


His Motherhood

by Hannah



Category: Scrubs (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 04:55:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 35
Words: 83,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6642142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cox had thought he’d learned he’d always be alone, and was trying to come to accept what he knew life held for him. Even after finding out about an upcoming medical study that was barely discussed by the medical profession, derided by all respectable sources, fully aware of what it promised and certain he’d never be invited – he surprised himself and applied just the same. Even when his application for an interview passed and he was invited to see if he qualified for rejection, he didn't allowed himself to hope. But maybe it was possible he hadn’t learned as well as he'd thought.</p><p>A story about love, family, building and breaking and repairing attachments, and how to carry the past and move into the future.</p><p> <br/><i>And if you see this world as ugly and thin</i><br/><i>Then you’ll be so cruel to the touch, you’ll lose the body you’re in</i><br/><i>To a land of angry soil that swallows boys and coughs up men</i><br/><i>I’ve seen you taste the salt of your tears</i><br/><i>You always stop when you start, and listen, you would be smart</i><br/><i>To keep yourself in a world of mothers, sisters, daughters and wives</i><br/><i> - “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters and Wives,” Voxtrot</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I play a good game but not as good as you

The building was the exact same color and shape as a carton of store-brand vanilla ice cream and looked about as threatening. It was standard West Coast Brutalist University of California architecture with the designers trying for stately and failing hard, their attempts at a grand forward-thinking design only successful in reminding people what the future looked like in the 1960s. If it’d been built anywhere else in the country it’d have been demolished and rebuilt in the Nineties with more glass and fewer hard curves and a lot less taupe, but out west, where it stuck out in contrast against the sharp blue sky, Cox could almost see why nobody had bothered to change anything. Sticking with what worked wasn’t necessarily a virtue, but right now, it was.

And, as so many ancient fables and children’s propaganda stories promised but only rarely delivered on, it wasn’t what was on the outside, but what was on the inside that mattered.

Not that anyone could tell that from the little courtyard in front of the main entrance, where Cox had been standing, pacing, waiting for the past fifteen minutes, with another twenty to go before his first scheduled appointment. He knew he didn’t stand a chance when it came to what was inside, but if he’d gotten this far, he’d at least earned the right to hear them say that to his face. It wouldn’t surprise him, the way everything had been working against him from the beginning.

He was just glad it was all far away from Sacred Heart.

Any other day, he’d also be glad he could take some time away from the hospital. Not just because of how nice a day it was – it’d started out nice before dawn, when he’d given up on getting back to sleep and went out for a run instead, and it had just stayed that way – but also because this was beyond where Jordan could possibly reach. There’d been an uptick in board meetings the last two months, and it had been getting harder and harder to stay at the very least aggressively polite in front of witnesses. She’d already moved out, but that hadn’t helped as much as either of them had wanted.

Cox sat down on one of the rectangular red-ochre concrete benches. He glanced around at the campus, then jumped to his feet and went back to walking the courtyard’s perimeter.

The call to arrange for the appointment had come a week ago. It’d been enough time that he’d gotten all of the day’s shifts covered for only nominal favors, and no matter what he heard after he went in, he could drink to it in private starting early and going late. What he’d hear when he got inside was hardly a question; what he’d be doing after this appointment was an absolute certainty. No matter how well it went, there’d be four more appointments after this, for the same time the same day of the week.

If this one went well, then he’d see about them.

So far, it’d been seven months of back-and-forth silences and conversations, initial applications and follow-up physical examinations, endless running in circles over the promise of possibly being approved to be contacted to be informed he wasn’t going to get picked for the next round, as though they had enough potential applicants to justify the process being this hard.

Then again, maybe they did: after all, if he was here, there was no knowing who else wanted in on it.

Cox crossed his arms, squinted up at the sunlight bouncing off the windows and wondered which one his appointment was going to be in.

He and Jordan had talked about children once, back when . . . back when. She’d laughed, saying they’d get another dog if he wanted to take care of something that helpless and messy. He’d laughed back with her, agreeing with the joke, saying it’d be easier to train it to help with housework at that.

Since then, he’d wondered if she’d meant it. There hadn’t been a chance to ask her about it again, not with how things were going between them – how they were _ending_ between them. All he regretted about it was knowing that he’d have a better chance at being selected for this if they weren’t nearly finished divorcing. If he’d shown up with a wife. Jordan could argue her case, he could argue his, they’d argue for each other.

Not so much of a chance of that anymore.

It’d only been with Jordan that he could picture himself parenting _with_ anyone. Now, even down the line, in some theoretical world where he’d been lucky enough for selection, none of the fantasies where he was with someone who’d co-parent had any weight. He couldn’t see someone else being there, staying there, fitting into the idea of family he wasn’t sure he could hold. None of the people he could slot into the role, from exes of varying degrees of seriousness to friends that’d be thrilled to help take care of a child, felt right. But imagining that child – that part felt real. That part he knew he could do, alone if he had to. If he could do it like this. He wouldn’t need anyone else if he could do it like this.

If he could do it at all.

He’d paced his way over to the entrance, up the four narrow steps to the door, and he could just about see inside. Like the rest of the building, the reception area looked like the past’s idea of the future with semi-cushioned pastel chairs, bland art on the walls, a reception desk curving out from the wall and stairs set next to the elevator to take people up to where the action was because god knew nothing important could ever happen on the first floor.

There were still ten minutes to go.

If he’d gotten far enough they were calling him in for the assessment interviews, he might as well show up and see what happened – find out what he already knew and take some comfort in not being at all surprised.

Cox took a step back to look up at the building against the sky, then yanked open the door and strode inside.


	2. I can’t do it, I can’t conceive

_First off, let me say thank you for inviting me. It’s – it’s really tremendous just to be in here. Just … really tremendous._

_It’s nice of you to say that._

_So – do we need to go over anything in particular? Was there anything you had in mind?_

_I’d just like to get to know you for now._

_We can do that._

_I’d like to do that._

_All right._

_So –_

_How did you learn about this?_

_About the Matthias Study?_

_Yes._

_Why?_

_I’m just curious._

_I’m close to someone who was working on it, and they recommended that I apply for this position._

_Oh._

_Were you expecting me to say something else?_

_Not really, no. I guess – I was wondering how someone on the other side of things got here._

_More or less the same way you did. I sent in my application, the people in charge decided they liked what I had to offer, I got an interview, and here we are._

_Here we are._

_Do you have anything else on your mind before we get to talking about you?_

_What sort of things are we going to talk about? I know, you’re going to be getting to know me. But…what sort of things will you be asking?_

_Have you ever been in therapy before?_

_No. Well – no._

_If you had, then I’d say it’d be something like that._

_Right._

_Is there anything I can do to make you feel comfortable?_

_What am I supposed to call you?_

_I’m sorry?_

_It says ‘Doctor B.R. Hanrahan’ outside, but – I know, “doctor”, but –_

_I am a doctor. I have a PhD and I have an MD. I’m a licensed psychiatrist, and I can issue prescriptions._

_Right._

_I’m just as much of a doctor as you are, but you don’t have to call me that if that makes you uncomfortable. You can just use my name._

_Right!_

_Did I just make a joke?_

_No, no. But if you think we’re going to be on that level in here, you can go right ahead and call me Percival._

*

The most astounding thing about Alison Wasmuth wasn’t that she’d had a heart attack; seventy-two-year-old white people with family histories of heart conditions that lived generally sedentary lives were pretty much myocardial infarction’s poster children. It wasn’t even that she’d been walking around for six days with half a working heart – and if she’d listened to Mathis at County General, she’d have walked around for another four and then stopped walking altogether – it was that she hadn’t listened to Mathis, checked herself into Sacred Heart, and demanded someone finally pay attention to her.

That she’d originally presented with a textbook example of a heart attack in a woman seemed to have been lost on Mathis. Wasmuth hadn’t even known what had been going wrong with her, just that her body hurt in ways it’d never hurt before, and Cox had to admire her for not taking no for an answer when it came to getting a diagnosis beyond gallstones. As tempting as it was to call Mathis and explain exactly why he was an incompetent jackass who didn’t deserve to practice medicine, and have a board-certified cardiologist at his side to back up every syllable, getting Wasmuth a treatment plan with said cardiologist was a bigger concern.

“That was a good catch you made,” Maugham said as they left Wasmuth’s room after hammering out an outline for short-term basics and long-term goals. “God, I swear I can just _hear_ Mathis giving some sorry excuse that it didn’t _look_ like a heart attack and didn’t _sound_ like one, but that’s only if you’re looking at men’s heart attacks.” She sighed as Cox handed off the chart at the nurse’s station. “I know Wasmuth didn’t say but I’m pretty well sure she didn’t even know women could get them.”

“No, she said as much to me. Something that she’d have known it’d have been a heart attack if there’d been the sudden chest pain and the over-dramatic fall.”

“Wait, let me guess. And then the _zap_ , clear, whole thing’s gone.” She sighed and pressed the elevator button. “ _That_ part is the single worst thing I can think of. You never see long-term management anywhere on TV or the movies. Not that I can remember, and I think I would.” 

Cox looked down at her. She looked up at him. Asking her how she was doing was out of the question, and he wished he’d taken the stairs instead of investing enough time waiting for the elevator he couldn’t leave. Maugham clasped her hands together behind her back, and they stepped inside, eyes boring holes into the elevator doors.

“Jordan’s doing –”

“Please don’t,” he said.

“Right. Sorry.”

“Not your fault. Just never mention her again if you know what’s good for you.”

“Just one thing. Just one. If she asks about you, what do I say?”

“I’d like you to tell her that divorcing her was the single best decision I’ve ever made, that she can go forth and destroy as many people as she wants, but alimony aside, her claws are out of me, finito, forever, and if I never see her again, I’ll be delighted.”

“Same as last time?”

“Same as last time.” The elevator was making its way down more slowly than usual. “So – how’s Margaret?”

“She’s doing well. She’ll be starting preschool this fall. Oliver’s good, too, he’s … there’s a new project he might be starting.”

“Oh. Good for him.” The elevator finally opened to greet them with the sight of the janitor decked out in full camouflage gear and face paint with fake leaf netting draped over his cart, and he stepped aside to let them in.

“You never saw me,” he whispered.

Cox was more than happy to go with that. The rest of the day moved as it always did in Sacred Heart, the usual repetitions of the same patterns of patients who didn’t know they were sick, didn’t believe how sick they were, staff not admitting to believe patients and administrating not listening to the staff under any circumstances. Nothing he wasn’t used to. There was a lot of waiting in medicine, and as long as he had something to occupy himself besides more waiting, he could handle it fine. He could finish up a paper with a reasonable chance of publication. Or he could dig up another mountain of research on everything he could find regarding Hanrahan and the Matthias Study, backed by the vague hope it would demonstrate his enthusiasm and interest in the work they were doing and help him stay on at least until the end of the initial assessment phase.

He could finally get around to washing his bathmat, because the alternative was thinking about the future.


	3. I’m nobody’s wife and I’m nobody’s baby

_Could you tell me about your relationships with your parents?_

_For the most part, it was pretty hands-off. If we had a problem, me or my sister, they’d expect us – we’d solve it ourselves. We got a lot of independence from a young age. Our parents were – they were always present, but, you know, there’d be things like how they’d let us play outside until it got dark without any direct supervision. There weren’t as many concerns about things like that when I was a kid._

_Are you in regular contact with either of them?_

_They’re both dead._

_I’m sorry._

_Thank you._

_And do you miss them?_

_I’d really rather not get into it._

_I understand. I lost my father a little while ago._

_Thanks._

_And what did your parents mean to you?_

_Sorry?_

_I’m not asking if you miss them. I’m asking what they meant to you._

_Of course they meant a lot to me. Why on Earth are you asking me that?_

_I just wanted to make sure._

_Well, you did. Happy now?_

_Yes, thank you._

*

It hadn’t taken Jordan long to remember how nice it was to live alone. Two days, and she was back to enjoying the full spread of the mattress, using the bathroom without any concern over anyone rushing her to finish her business, no negotiation whatsoever on whether the lights should be on or off, none of the millions of petty arguments that gave way to a handful of serious ones. The entire apartment was her domain to rule over as she pleased. But still, nice as it was to be the first citizen, sometimes it was nice to have a populace. Like around dinnertime. Perry had always done the bulk of the cooking – even if he hadn’t been the best chef she’d ever dated, he was leagues better than she was, and Jordan had lived with him long enough to forget how much hassle and work it was to cook something besides coffee and cereal for breakfast or nuking a can of soup for dinner.

There’d been a well-catered housewarming party just after she’d moved in, and she’d eaten the leftovers for the rest of the week as she went out and bought things she hadn’t thought she’d ever have to think about again. Things like potholders and spatulas. Ben said all she needed was a cast-iron skillet and a big pot, Danni said she’d help her stock up on spices, and Mom had come over with a list of essentials Jordan had to admire for its generosity in her cooking abilities and a coffee machine just as nice as the one still on Perry’s countertop.

Housewarming parties were the sort of thing you could only do twice if you pushed it. People over for lunch or just coffee could happen over and over, and at this point, it could still include the occasional sympathy gift. Especially from people who’d been friends with her ex-husband.

Every time they talked, Jordan was happy all over again that she’d gotten to keep both the Maughams in the divorce. Perry couldn’t completely get away from Katharine since he still had to work with her if he needed a cardiology consultation, but like Kath said, all that it meant was that if she happened to be available to give one right that moment, they’d both be dealing with a patient and not each other. She also said that didn’t happen often or last long enough for those situations to get awkward. None of those interactions were going to slip out to Jordan unless she specifically asked, and she knew she sure wasn’t going to bother if it wouldn’t be worth it.

“So how’s Perry these days?” She handed Kath a cup of coffee and sat down with her at the kitchen table.

“He’s been about the same. Growling at Kelso, shouting at the interns, making those long speeches just to hear his voice. A lot of keeping to himself. Just like the last time you asked.” Kath took a sip. “You’re at the hospital often enough you could go ahead and ask him yourself.”

“I’m not going to willingly engage with him for more time than it takes to acknowledge his presence unless there’s a lawyer or a bartender standing by. And Ted doesn’t count.” Jordan pushed her chair back to sit at the very edge of it with her elbows on the table. “I’ve been going to Sacred Heart longer than Perry’s worked there. It’s really not a problem to compartmentalize.”

“That’s fair.” Kath kept both her hands wrapped around the mug. Her fingernails were bright green today. She’d only recently started manicures and taking the time each morning to do more than some blush and a little lipstick: foundation, mascara, liquid eyeliner, her whole face every morning and Jordan had to admit Kath had a natural hand for it. “You’re settling in well. Very warm and homey.”

“Thank you.” The only major concession to decoration in the apartment was a set of take-out menus stuck to the fridge courtesy of some novelty magnets from Ben. Jordan had been planning on getting something for the walls, possibly repainting them, but she hadn’t made the time for that yet. “It’s very well curated, trust me. You know, it’s funny I’d forgotten how nice living alone can be. And no, don’t give me any of that look – I’m not going to be getting lonely living alone anytime soon. I’ve just remembered how nice it is to have my own space by now. Nobody’s here unless I want them to be.”

“Which is why Margaret wasn’t invited over today?” Jordan grinned with all her teeth, and Kath sighed. “I know you’ve heard it a thousand times, so just – kids are great if you want them. I know you don’t right now. Maybe you will and if that happens it’ll be wonderful, but if you don’t that’s fine too. There. Cliff Notes over. Does that work? Good. Thanks.”

“At this point I think Danni has a better chance of giving my mom grandkids.”

“Now that’s a scary thought.” Kath took another sip of coffee. “I’m still glad I had Margaret when I did. I – no. We won’t get into that today.”

“Right.” Jordan nodded, sipped coffee, tapped her own plain nails against the bare tabletop. “So! You sound like you’re doing good. I know you said you weren’t going in today – are you still on a three-day week?”

“Four. If I take good care of myself, I should be back to five by the end of the year.”

“Anything else going on?”

“Hematopathology set up a pool for when Perry finally drops the charade and breaks down in public.”

“I know as a hospital board member I’m not _supposed_ to enter those things …”

“I’ve got him for December seventeenth if you want to go halfsies on it.”

“I’m in. So, anyway, besides that, what’s going on in your life?” Kath hesitated, then smiled, and Jordan knew that meant something good and big. “Spill, please. I need some personal news I can get my teeth around.”

“It’s not really that newsworthy, it’s – oh, why not, I already turned them down. Someone tried to poach me from Sacred Heart. It was actually really flattering. They said they needed a top-notch cardiologist, and they wanted to go for direct recruitment.”

“No.”

“Yes. Well, no to working for them. I said I like working at Sacred Heart and changing my insurance right now would be too much of a pain to even _think_ about. By the way, the in-plan guy you recommended did a great job.”

“You know you could’ve gotten something different?”

“I liked what my chest looked like. Now it’ll keep looking like that for the rest of my life.”

“So what were you getting scouted for?”

“Some crazy medical study they’re doing at the university. I can’t say much since so much of it’s confidential, but I think I’m allowed to let you know they’ll be researching pregnancy.” Kath stopped smiling when Jordan giggled. “Okay, what aren’t you sharing with the class?”

“I’d just heard about this _other_ crazy medical study they’re doing at the university. It was a while ago, though, and didn’t sound like anything big, so it couldn’t be this thing of yours, but it really sounded so crazy – La Croix said something about it at the last board meeting, but –”

“What did she say?” 

Jordan blinked, startled by the sudden seriousness in Kath’s tone. “Like I said, it was a while ago, and I really don’t remember much.” 

“I’m sure you remember _something_ ,” Kath pressed, somewhere halfway between desperate and determined. She didn’t sound like she wanted to be proven right but knew she would be anyway, and Jordan hated knowing that tone from her own life.

“Yes, just give me a minute to _tell_ you, sheesh. Anyway. She told me someone told _her_ there was this one study someone was doing at that one UC’s primate research center, you know the one up north that keeps getting protested by the SPCA, PETA, all those groups? That one. Anyway, the protests were getting to be too much for them, but instead of closing the study down, they’d just transferred the whole shebang down here.” Nodding, Kath leaned in like three more inches would help her hear better. “She’d said that the thing that pushed them, the protesters, over the edge this time was that they’d finally, the research group, they’d gotten a uterus to stay where they’d stuck it inside the male chimpanzee, which, even if it’s good for the researchers, still doesn’t seem like anything worth protesting over. Big deal, they gave a chimp something he didn’t come with factory-equipped, so what, it’s not like they’re sticking a baby in there too. I don’t get why they sent it all down here. The closest monkey house is the zoo and they’re not cleared for medical research.” Jordan shook her head and sipped her coffee, then stared at Kath’s expression of near-horror. “What is it?” Then it clicked, and Jordan almost felt sick. “Oh. Oh, _crap_ , was that – but why –”

“PETA doesn’t protest human trials,” Kath said quietly. “They’d never even gotten one of the chimps gravid, much less carry to term, but … proof positive of the concept having some viability.”

“If they asked you to – if they need a cardiologist, if they’re _ready_ for that, then – why would … _is_ there a why for that?”

“I don’t know why it started. I didn’t ask why they decided this would be the best possible thing for them to dedicate their lives to pursuing. I can’t begin to guess that, and honestly, I don’t really want to. I didn’t ask when they talked to me because that wasn’t what I wanted to know when they told me about it.” She took a deep breath and almost sounded happy when she said, “I asked if I could put Oliver in touch with them. And that would be the why. At least for me.”

“You think he’d be willing to go through that?”

“I got permission to tell him. He contacted them, and he’s got an interview to find out if he can. It’s that … we’re already checking into adoption, surrogacy. This would – I admit this is going pretty far out there, paging Mary Shelly out there. But the time and the cost of everything – it wouldn’t be all that different compared to the other options. In terms of things like that.” Kath smiled. “I always wanted Margaret to be someone’s big sister.”


	4. Tina says don’t talk to me like I am deaf and dumb

_Do you expect me to say I’m happy to be here?_

_I’m not expecting you to say anything._

_Just because I’m here doesn’t mean I’ll be going farther. I mean, I want to. Of course I do, and of course I want to do whatever I can to make sure of that. I just – with a thing like this, it’s better not to get your hopes up. You’ve got however many applications for so few positions, and assuming I’m going to be one of them just sets me up for disappointment. I don’t come here thinking you’re going to put me through just because I’m here. So I wouldn’t say I’m happy to be here. I’m excited, sure, and all right maybe I am a little happy, but the moment a session’s over, that last session becomes as far as I know I’ve come. I won’t know if it’ll be as far as I’ll have ever gone. So I’m doing my best to not set myself up for anything._

_So it’s been a good week at work?_

_Honestly, yes, it has been._

*

If all that he had left of Jordan were the alimony payments and the occasional threat of running into her when she deigned to grace Sacred Heart with her presence for a board meeting, and possibly having to deal with her in the context of said board meetings, Cox would have been more than all right with things.

That she’d decided to add the incidental booty call into the arrangement wasn’t something he’d ever considered as a possibility, but if he was being honest with himself, he hadn’t put up much resistance when she’d suggested it. He could always change the locks, or not answer the door, but what with everything going on in his life right now, having the regular distraction – not a particularly healthy one, but still reasonably enjoyable – was a big help with getting through the worst of it.

She didn’t ask him how he was, or what he was doing, which he appreciated. He didn’t ask her what was going on in her life, which he knew she liked. Sometimes they didn’t even talk beyond Jordan declaring when she had to leave that evening and Cox remarking she’d at least have gone to the trouble of bringing condoms herself. But they always went ahead and fucked anyway.

Every so often, they talked afterwards. A while afterwards, when Jordan was done with her shower and got her clothes back on, when Cox had poured them both a drink if Jordan had said she wasn’t driving. Tonight he poured them each a double of scotch on the rocks and didn’t bother putting his shirt back on, just leaned back on the couch while she took one of the chairs.

“My patient Wasmuth is doing fine,” he said. “The one you almost didn’t approve for coronary revascularization.”

“I heard she’ll be out at the end of the month.”

“Sooner, probably. Thanks to the swift and merciful judgment of you and your fellow board members.”

“Yes, thank goodness the surgeons _didn’t_ kill her on the table.”

“It’s what I say every time I have to send someone into an OR.”

“Cheers,” she said, raising her glass to him. “You wouldn’t think there’d be so many practical applications coming out of that one study, but I guess the applications beyond the obvious –”

“What one study?” He leaned in, interested in spite of himself.

“Oh, you know.” Jordan smiled. “That one they’re doing out of the UC. What’s its name – the Matthias Study, I think? The one where –”

“I know what that is,” Cox didn’t quite snap. More defensive than he wanted to be, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“So you already know about it?”

“I’ve heard a few things.”

“How’s that? They’re not that big on advertising.”

“I’ve just – you know, _around_ , you actually pay attention to the field of medicine instead of just dictating hospital policy from a board room you’ll hear what’s new, you – how did _you_ hear about it?”

“That’s not nearly as important as your wanting to know how I know. How much do you know about it? Besides that it exists.”

“A little,” Cox managed. “There’s everything they’ve done, but for the applied work of it they’ve –”

“No.” She shook her head, eyes all sharp. “No, they wouldn’t have reached out to you, I’d have heard if they were asking to recruit you. And you wouldn’t care if I knew if you – oh my God, Perry. You want that. You’re crazy enough to want in on that.” Cox looked away. “God _dammit,_ Perry. I knew you really wanted kids, but I didn’t think you wanted them that badly.” 

“It’s good science. What’s the worst they can say to me, _no_?” He almost felt ashamed. Jordan smiled over her drink and pulled her feet in underneath her, toes slipping between the cushions, but she didn’t look any smaller. Cox had always liked how she did that, how she could pull herself into a small space but still take up half the room.

“If this had come along earlier, we might be fighting over custody right now,” Jordan laughed. “You know how much I always wanted to be a father.”

“It’d suit you. Impregnate someone, disappear as soon as the dirty deed’s over, never show up or take any major responsibility for the new life you’ve helped create,” Cox said.

“So what’s going to happen? Are you going to get a phone call to let you know you’ve been approved?”

“I’ll get a call to let me know if they’ll let me in for the next round of screening tests.”

“Am I going to get a phone call?”

“You? No. Come on, Jordan, I want them to say yes to me.”


	5. Old man lyin’ by the side of the road

_I was – I would’ve been five, she was still a baby then. I remember looking down at my sister and how she was crying. I don’t remember where in the house it was, just that I was looking down at her. Our mother wasn’t doing anything to calm her down. She wasn’t even in the same room, but I knew I couldn’t call her, and this was after Benjamin Spock came along but not that my mother cared whether or not you ought to comfort a crying baby or just leave them alone until they’ve shut up. My sister, she kept crying, and I thought, if she was my baby I’d do better. If she was mine, I’d do better. I didn’t think about it in the context of how I’d have a baby, just that if I had one – if I had one, I’d be doing better than this._

_You never thought about having a baby in the context of being a father?_

_No. Just for a little while when I was married._

_With Jordan._

_Yes. I remember telling my teacher what I’d do if I had a baby, and she told me…I’d tried to explain I didn’t want to be a father because that’d mean the baby wouldn’t belong to me. It wouldn’t be mine. Not in the way it’d mattered to me when I was five. But that didn’t really come out all that well. I was five. She gave me this book, and it was – it was all right, from what I remember. I read it and learned what fathers do and what mothers do, and I realized what I’d have to do to have a baby. The only way I could. And it … it disgusted me. I knew my father, and I didn’t want … I didn’t want that._

_How do you feel about it now?_

_If it was with someone I knew I could manage with, maybe – I don’t think so. I don’t think it’d work out if it happened like that. It wouldn’t have worked out between us if we’d managed to have children, god forbid we’d done that. It would’ve just…_

_Yes?_

_I don’t like to think about what it would’ve been like for a child if they’d been there. Any child, at all. How what they would’ve seen would’ve – even if we’d kept it between ourselves and put on the good faces we’d have to put on to face the world, that child would know, and that child would’ve seen and heard and – even if it wasn’t about them, they would know it was because of them, and even if it wasn’t, there … there are things I know I’d never do. I mean, never. If I’d had children with Jordan, I know I wouldn’t have – I’m not even scared I might have because I never would have. It’s good we didn’t. At the end, how things … broke, for a child to have been there, I don’t want to think about it._

*

The stuff Jordan wanted to read about the Matthias Study wasn’t anything she could find in newspapers or medical journals. She wasn’t interested in reading about the work that had gotten them to human trials. Stories and anecdotes about the protests it’d received, sure, the occasional article about applied medical technologies and breakthroughs that came out of it the way NASA gave the world freeze-dried fruit, that too. The guy who’d donated fifty-two million dollars in 1987 and wasn’t even upset he hadn’t made it through the hormone testing phase to become a mother himself now that the dream was finally approaching reality, just happy he’d helped it get there, was a pretty interesting character in his own right.

Learning about the Study was tricky, but it wasn’t _impossible_. It was easy enough to find out it’d started in a small teaching hospital in Philadelphia, that it began as a small project that expanded to cover a lot of medical fields before re-focusing in California and finally announcing its main purpose, that they were only doing this now because the technology to make it possible had arrived, that their main reason – the reason they kept repeating, over and over – was that they wanted what was essentially a control group in order to better study human pregnancy.

Doing all the research herself was fine, but it was a whole lot easier to accept Kath’s invitation to a dinner party she didn’t particularly want to attend, offer to lend a hand in the kitchen, corral Oliver, and start asking the right questions in between assembling fried artichokes onto a serving platter and assuring him she wouldn’t breathe a word of what he told her to anyone who didn’t have the proper clearance.

He looked around, back out at the dining room where Kath was conducting adults and children with equal ease, at the food they’d gotten arranged just so, and then smiled at Jordan. “We’ve got a few minutes.”

“In that case, spill.” She pushed the artichokes aside to lean her elbows on the tiled countertop.

“There’s not a lot I can share to begin with,” he said. “I’m not the doctor in the family. But I’ve gotten to know some of the doctors there, and I might be able to tell you a few things. What was it you’d wanted to know?”

“Where it came from. Who started it. _Why_ they started it. That sort of thing. I know what it’s trying to do, but that doesn’t tell me whose idea it was in the first place.”

“That’s a bit of a tall order, since I can’t deliver on all of that. Not won’t, _can’t_. There were some things I didn’t ask. But I can next time I’m in.”

“In for…?”

“We have these assessment sessions, we being the potential participants we, to see if we’re a good fit for what the doctors want. There’s another layer of physical testing to come later, but right now, it’s to see that we’re not going to crack under the pressure of being pregnant. This is the first time this is going to happen, so the people in charge want to make sure it goes as smoothly as possible. It’s sort of like going to the moon, really. I’ve got another month of therapy visits, and there’s the chance something else might happen. Fingers crossed and all that. As for when it started, that I asked, and it’s March of 1970. All the way back to the first Nixon administration. It was somewhere back East, I think Pennsylvania, but it came to California in the mid-nineties.” He grabbed the nearest mitt and opened the oven to pull out the tray of slow-roasted tomatoes.

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“I haven’t asked most of what you want to know because I don’t want to know their reasons for starting it. I just want to know if I can be _in_ it.”

“I guess that’s reasonable.”

“Hey,” Kath stuck her head in the door, “we’re waiting on you out here.”

“Just a minute, we’ll be right there.” Oliver gave her a quick kiss and turned back to Jordan. “Come by for coffee sometime. I’ll fill you in on the rest.”

“I’d love it.” Some three days later, while the hospital went on without her and Margaret was busy playing on the monkey bars of the nearest public park, Jordan sipped her mocha and waited for Oliver to make her time with him worthwhile. It took him all of two minutes.

“There’s actually something I’d like to ask _you_ , if that’s all right. And you can say no if it’d make you uncomfortable, if you don’t want to do it.”

“You’re making it sound like you’ll owe me a gigantic favor just for considering it, so please continue.”

“You know how strict the selection process is. There’s only going to be fifty babies coming out of this, so they only want the absolute best.”

“I’m a little amazed there’s enough people signing up for this they can _have_ a set of the absolute best.”

“Pregnancy is strange and desirable and strangely desirable.” Jordan followed his eyes to Margaret hanging upside-down by her knees. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that. “And to make sure the best are in fact the best – would you mind if I put you down to interview for me?” 

“You want me to what for you?”

“It’s nothing big. I just wanted to make sure I’d get everyone I could before I go into – well. They interview us, of course, and they also interview people who _know_ us. It’s to make sure they know all the prospective candidates from every angle. And it’d mean a lot to me and Kath if you’d be willing to do this for us.”

“I _probably_ could. It’d depend on when and where, and – I will if you tell me why this is something you’re so dedicated to getting.” She slung an arm over the back of the bench and turned to face him. “It can’t just be because you want another kid, because there’s a million ways to get one of those. You’re jumping off the end of the world with this.”

“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t at least part of it. Nobody’s ever done this before.” Oliver sipped his coffee. “But you’re right, there’s more to it than that. It’s that…some of it was that I saw how happy Kath was when she was pregnant with Margaret, and I thought how I’d never get to know that or know what it’d be like. Now, I might. I’d get to do this wonderful thing I see all around me, something I never thought would even be possible, and that’s pretty amazing. And – yes, surrogacy, adoption, everything like that, we’d get Margaret another brother or sister in some way. We’re _getting_ her another some way. But if we do it this way – if we did it this way, it’d be _ours_.”

“Which is why you’re willing to be the gestational parent.”

“That would be why.”


	6. Did you really believe it would be a different voice

_You spent half of last week’s session talking about hockey._

_You said it was all right to talk about whatever I wanted._

_Which is fine. It’s that you’re a dedicated Detroit Red Wings fan. From Pittsburgh._

_Your point?_

_It’s a move of calculated assholery._

_I don’t know if I’d go that far –_

_It is. I kind of have to admire you for it._

_Really?_

_Just a little._

*

It’d been easy enough for Carla to get back to being Cox’s coworker after his brief and awkward fumble at dating – everyone knew about the divorce, even the cadavers downstairs in the basement had to know – but it was taking him more time. As long as he kept it out of the patients’ rooms when they were working together, she’d keep staying fine with it, and he mostly remembered that. When he didn’t, he usually accepted her reminders with as much grace as he could muster – not much, but enough that the effort counted for something.

It counted enough that she made herself remember she knew how much he needed someone who didn’t do everything they could to make his life miserable. 

Some days he remembered that, too.

“Listen, I know what Kelso says. I’ve heard it at least eight hundred times since last Monday. I’m well aware of the policy on _paper_ , Carla, and if you don’t think –”

“This isn’t about maintaining the policies, this is about me doing _my job_ whether or not there’s someone hovering around like the world’s most obnoxious mosquito while I’m trying to keep someone alive long enough for an oh-so-important doctor to get into his patient’s room so he can scribble his name down so I can _keep_ doing my job.”

“Am I disagreeing with you there? Have I _ever_ said I’m disagreeing with you on that? No. Please don’t put words in my mouth that I haven’t actually said. It’s beyond aggravating, it’s – hang on.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and when he saw the number, Carla had never seen anyone go that pale that fast. Cox stood still a moment then fumbled with the phone, almost breaking it open and managing a greeting before turning to Carla and saying, “I’m sorry, but I have to take this. We can get this up later but you’re totally right on everything, just – I’ve gotta take this.”

She didn’t get a chance to say it was fine before he was gone, down the hall and behind a door in the room vacated by Miss Tabitha Cavil as of forty minutes ago, her death the source of the morning’s argument about nurse autonomy and doctor management.

Laverne tapped her fingernails on the counter. “Any idea what’s got him runnin’ like that?”

“I don’t even wanna guess.” Carla sighed and made a show out of pulling out the next patient’s chart in the pile and reading over words she already knew because if she’d _wanted_ to guess, it might’ve had something to do with the interview she’d had close to a month ago. Someone who sounded professional called her up to see if they could get her one day off that month for themselves because it happened to be important, and when she’d negotiated them down to lunch at work because of how much they’d needed to talk, they’d upped the ante by taking her out to a place that used napkins and silverware for lunchtime customers and then talked about Cox for an hour. Serious, heavy talking, interview talking, which must have been why they’d gone all out for a place with silverware. The woman, a doctor herself, who’d been tight-lipped about who she was working with and why she wanted to talk about Cox, had asked a few very general questions and a lot of specific ones. Carla had answered as best she could, and the doctor had picked up the check and let her take an extra serving of peach cheesecake home to her mother.

Now, Carla glanced up halfway through her chart reading, and Cox was still in the empty room. When she came back from checking on Daniel Mounsey’s post-amputation infection, Laverne said he hadn’t left.

“I haven’t heard any screaming yet.” Laverne shook her head. “Whatever he got that call for can’t be _that_ bad.”

Carla didn’t want to make a guess what it might be that had him behind a closed door in an empty room for ten minutes now _without_ any screaming involved. She didn’t make a show of walking past the room after twenty minutes or stopping beside the door and leaning in closer to try to hear something, and being a little surprised when she heard nothing. No sobbing, no yelling, no nothing. She raised her hand to knock on the door, but hesitated when she saw her fist up against the wood and pulled it back and turned around and returned to the nurse’s station.

It took him thirty minutes to come out, dazed and quiet, looking like he didn’t know where he was. He kept glancing around like he’d been lost and didn’t know how he’d managed to find his way home again.

“Hey there,” she said when he reached the counter.

“Hey. Yeah, I’ll just…who was it I was going to see?”

“Mounsey. Footless guy. Room two-six-eight.”

“Right. Him, that. Thank you.”

“No problem.” He threw her a smile and wave before leaving to check on his patients, and Carla could tell he’d meant that smile. She knew the phone call couldn’t have been that bad for him to have smiled like that. But she also knew seeing Cox happy _now_ meant something bigger than what she knew was happening.

Her mother suggested it was a new woman in his life. Carla might’ve guessed that, too, if the phone call hadn’t been that long and if he hadn’t come out looking like he’d been weeping.

There wasn’t even a spring in his step the next morning. The phone call might not have happened if other nurses hadn’t been there to witness and corroborate the reports of his moments of joy. It made Carla throw up her hands over it: just one more thing to be worried about around Sacred Heart.


	7. I received a message from my brother across the water

_I put down five people. How many do the others have? Thirty? Forty? Five._

_Are you worried about –_

_What I’m worried about is you might actually pick me for this._

_Why’s that? You’re an excellent candidate in every respect._

_Really?_

_Yes._

_Thank you._

_You’re welcome. Did you not think you were?_

_I wasn’t trying to think of myself in that way. I was – I know I’m good enough to be considered, but there’s a baseline for that, and if someone comes in wanting to be a mother and they meet that baseline, you’re willing to consider them. That doesn’t make me exceptional. Just being here doesn’t make me special. And I know I’ve been trying not to crush myself under the weight of the hopes and half-formed fantasies I had before I understood the basic biology necessary for human reproduction. You’ve given me permission to do that by saying I’m an excellent candidate, but I’m still not going to. I want this, god, I want this. I’m not going to lie to you and say I don’t. I’m not going to lie to myself about it. But I’m not trying to think I’ll become a mother just because I’m what you’re looking for or even that I make the effort to show up. I’m not…_

_Yes?_

_Nobody deserves to become a mother. It’s something you earn, it’s not something you deserve, not even if you’re lucky. There’s no luck in becoming a mother. Sometimes there’s hard work and sometimes it’s effortless and it’s happening right now to someone who wants it, and it’s happening right now to someone who doesn’t, but saying you deserve motherhood makes it sound like there’s some arbitrary judging involved in who’s worthy of it, and god knows there isn’t any._

_Well, not always._

_Right. Here. There’s some judging involved here. But everywhere else?_

_There are some places people are judged before motherhood._

_They shouldn’t be._

_Why’s that?_

_I understand the Study needs to be careful about what it’s doing. I don’t want to say that’s how it should be anywhere else. This is special. It’s different. I want to be a part of it, but I’d be luckier than I am – I was lucky to be considered, and I’d be lucky to be selected. But I don’t deserve motherhood just because I’ve been lucky enough to get here._

_Do you think you’ve earned motherhood?_

_I don’t think there’s a good way I can answer that._

_You can answer it honestly._

*

When the phone rang and it was Perry on the other end, I knew something big was going on. The two of us don’t call each other unless we’ve got a good reason, and calling just to talk isn’t one. We both know it’d be nowhere near a good idea for one of us to reach out to the other and make what might’ve been a good day into one we just have to grind down and bear through until tomorrow. We’ll go far enough to send each other cards for our birthdays and maybe Thanksgiving but never farther than that. We’re not going to ruin a day by talking to what’s left of our family.

I usually call him a couple of times a year, almost always around Easter because I know for Perry it’s just another Sunday. Those conversations are always short, to the point, and never sentimental. Even during his divorce, I talked to Jordan more than I talked to Perry. Especially during his divorce, I knew he didn’t need to talk to me.

He might’ve wanted to, but he didn’t need to. We almost never need to talk to each other.

So when he asked me _how I was doing_ , I knew there was something and could almost guess what it was.

But I answered him honestly, just because I could.

“I’m actually doing pretty good. We’re getting ready for a food drive event – we tried it out last year, paint a bowl to fill a bowl, and it went well enough we’re doing it again.”

“And you get a decent turnout for that?”

“Better than decent. People bring their kids, they make a day of it. The whole community gets engaged, and it’s good outreach without being too much, you know, ending up feeling guilt over doing good that can happen sometimes with events like this. Hey, I could make you one, if you want.”

“No, thank you. It’s very nice of you to offer, but I honestly can’t see how I’d make use of another dimestore-sourced hand-painted cereal bowl.”

“I figured you’d already worked your way through all your cheap dinnerware and were down to breaking the good china to let off some steam.”

“I’ve never owned anything _close_ to good china, and if I was into wanton destruction of property to let off steam, it would’ve been the first thing to go.”

I leaned against the wall and smiled. “So how are things out west these days?”

“It’s a hospital. People come in, sometimes they come out, and Kelso’s still doing what he can to bring misery and hate to everyone he comes into contact with.”

“I meant with you.” I knew it was a risk, asking him how he was doing. But it was a risk I knew I could run.

“Not so bad, really. Things are settled down around here, the lawyers figured out a reasonable payment plan – she’s not working, but she doesn’t need it. Basically, I’m paying her electric bill or whatever it is she decides to spend my money on.”

“Any interesting patients?”

“Heart attacks, bacterial infections, liver disease, nothing worth writing papers about.” He took a deep breath, and I girded my loins. “Listen, Paige, there’s this…”

“What is it, Perry?”

I listened to him breathe and didn’t prompt him at all, just let him collect himself while trying my best to savor the experience of having my brother on the phone. “It’s…okay. Okay. There’s a – I’ve been offered the chance to join up in this thing, I can’t tell you what it is yet, but as soon as I can I will. What I have to –”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Perry, you _never_ call me unless there’s some genuine reason for you to do so, and if not even getting engaged to Jordan was big enough since, as you said, _I figured I’d go ahead and wait for the wedding to let you know how things were going between us_ , this has got to be a gigantic reason, I mean a _mondo_ reason. If it’s big enough for you to actually pick up the phone and talk to me, I’m going to say yes. To whatever it is you need so badly you actually let me talk to you. Before you hang up, thank you. So what do you need?” I couldn’t even hear him breathing. “Hello?” 

“I need a donation of your uterine tissues,” he deadpanned.

“You need a what of my what-what now?”

“I need a donation of your uterine tissues.”

“I’m not saying no, but would you mind filling me in on –”

“It’d be an outpatient procedure, nothing too invasive, just a basic endometrial biopsy. Thirty minutes, tops, and you’d be out of there with prescription-level painkillers for your troubles. How’s that sound?”

“Would it be like getting a pap smear?” I hate pap smears.

“No, this would be a little more involved than that. You’ll get numbed beforehand, and then a narrow pipette is inserted into –”

“You can stop now. I said yes. I’m not taking that back, but if I’m getting numbed beforehand and I don’t have to look and it’ll be done in thirty minutes tops that’s _plenty_.”

“Fair enough.”

“Does this have anything to do with that other phone call?”

“What other call?”

I smiled at how nervous he sounded. “A few weeks ago someone called asking about you. She said she was a doctor but she wasn’t affiliated with Sacred Heart, just this other medical study, and that it’d be helpful to them if I was willing to give them a little of my time to talk about you.” From the sounds he was making, I could picture the angry confusion perfectly, but didn’t laugh. “Yes, Perry, I talked to her for almost an hour, if that makes you feel any better.”

“A little. But I can’t tell you what this is all for. Not yet.”

“If it works, can you tell me?”

“Paige, if it works, I’ll call you to tell you.”

“Then even though I already said yes, I’m going to say yes again, just to make sure to remind you I’m going to hold you to that and call _you_ if you don’t call me first.”

“Please, not that, anything but that,” he droned.

“So are these people going to call me again?”

“I’ll let them know, and they’ll call you.”

We didn’t talk for much longer than that, but he stayed on the line long enough to say goodbye reasonably nicely, and that was more than what he usually did – a grunt, or a talk-to-you-later, or if I was lucky, a couple of words wishing me well in between mocking my job and my life. This time, he actually said goodbye. He sounded like he meant it, too.

I know I did when I said it to him.

Perry was right about the biopsy not being too bad. A week after the preliminary examination and the monumental headache of signing and faxing all the consent forms, the gynecologist made sure I couldn’t feel anything before she started, and I ran the Hail Mary and Our Father through my head as she chatted about how her day was going and how nicely my cervix was behaving. I didn’t ask how they were getting the tissue samples to California, and even though I had a good idea what it was they’d be doing with them, I didn’t ask about that, either. We don’t talk much – Jordan had been the one to call me to tell me she’d gotten engaged to my brother – but I knew Perry was good for his word. I knew if it didn’t work out, I’d still have gotten some time talking to him and the fantasy that my uterus might be good for something. But I knew that if it did, he’d call me to let me know.


	8. They pulled in just behind the bridge

_Do you think you’ve earned motherhood?_

_I still don’t think there’s a good way I can answer that._

_You can –_

_If I’ve earned this somehow, if everything lines up and it comes through and I hear the magic words, I still wouldn’t – not right now, I haven’t. Not yet. It’d be everything that comes after, the pregnancy, the baby, all of that. That’s where I’d be earning this. Yes, I know me getting pregnant would be what we’d call ‘a big break’ for science and medicine. And it wouldn’t be all that impressive because oh look, just now someone got pregnant, and oh goodness there it’s happened again. Listen. It’s not just having the baby. I’m not discounting nine months of gestating another person, I’m not. I’m trying to say…once the baby’s born, when the child is here, that’s where it comes in. Past the gestation, past the baby’s arrival, the part of having the child, of raising the child, that’s where it’d happen for me. That’s where motherhood is. I’ve dreamed – I’ve thought about how I could be a parent. Here, or somewhere else if you show me the door, I could find a surrogate, I could adopt, I could…I might not be a mother, but I would love a child however I became their parent._

_Isn’t being a mother what you want?_

_It’s all I want. I just…I don’t like how much I want it. I think about it, and I think about how it might happen, and I can’t let myself do more than imagine the words together, just that thought, ‘it might happen.’ I don’t want to go beyond that. I try not to, if I can._

_Even now?_

_Even now._

*

One of Jordan’s most vivid memories of her father was from when she’d been four years old. He’d explained what he did for a living, and right that moment, she’d had a flash of cold awareness she’d always be surrounded by sick people. In retrospect, she was a little happy about the fact that those sick people hadn’t included her dad, at least not for long. Just a little. But enough that it made seeing Ben on chemo harder than she thought it’d be because Dad hadn’t gone through being sick for as long as Ben might. Jordan had thought dealing with Ben on chemo might actually be okay because she’d already seen what chemo did to a body. But just because she’d seen Kath sick didn’t mean she’d been prepared to see Ben sick. Dealing with him being sick, that she could do: help him with laundry, vacuum his floor, give him a ride to and from the hospital, hit the grocery store and try to throw some dinner together.

Being with him when he was sick was harder. She’d been able to look Kath right in the eye even on her worst days, but it was hard for her to look at Ben. It was easier when Danni was around, and sometimes when Danni came by and it was just the three of them playing cards or board games, it was easy to feel like they were all kids again and this would all be over soon.

When Kath had been sick, Jordan had learned a decent way for dealing with someone close to her being on chemo was regular rounds of good-old fashioned sex. Thankfully, Perry didn’t mind providing. Not that Jordan gave him a choice, but not that he put up anything close to a fight. They didn’t talk about it except a token protest at the start, and then it was clothes off, condom on, and no talking about anything else, either.

The Matthias Study hadn’t come up again between them. Jordan still suspected she’d have some sort of discussion with Perry about it eventually, one way or the other. Knowing Perry, it was probably the other. She could tell something was going on in his life that he didn’t want to share, just from the little things he tried to hide and what everyone else said around the hospital, and she knew not to ask or mention anything. Not just because it gave her some plausible deniability for how much she liked how he’d suddenly gotten into foreplay and actually sometimes slept next to her when she didn’t leave right away. If she said anything, he’d know she knew and put a stop to anything she might use against him, no matter how much she enjoyed it. And not just because she didn’t want to think about how much attention it meant she gave him to pick up on it all.

She had a decent idea of what was going on with Perry, mostly from what Kath and Oliver were telling her about what Oliver was going through – what they could share that wasn’t forbidden from non-disclosure agreements while the Study continued its most basic preliminary phases of preparing to get ready to start its human trials. They’d told her about the hormone injections, the cocktail the doctors had settled on for Oliver and how it was modified from the base dosage after testing for individual adaptability, the schedules Oliver had to keep, everything the doctors were monitoring for, the side-effects Oliver and Kath been warned about.

As much fun as she had with it, watching Perry to see if he was hiding the same things Oliver was openly going through wasn’t a game she’d admit to playing.

It was hard for her to feel bad about knowing things Perry didn’t when it came to something that mattered to him so much. The only time that happened was when the Matthias Study came up and the news didn’t involve anyone she knew. Like when she had to read an article on a new procedure she needed to give a board member’s approving vote on and ended up reading through the rest of the journal, even the citations, to find names she knew were associated with the Study and discussions of applied techniques coming out of it. Or when Oliver talked about how hopeful the whole thing made him and how much more Kath was smiling over what their future had during one afternoon, and Perry fell asleep with her lying next to him that night.

Being in a position of power and authority had always agreed with her, but the position she had right now wasn’t easy to define or manage.

So she kept fucking Perry and talking to Kath about how Oliver was taking well enough to hormones he wasn’t going to get booted out early, and avoided anything personal and intimate with Perry. Not her fucking his little intern, not how she was fucking him, not even _Ben_. She’d gotten a rhythm back to her life. If it was Perry who wanted to disrupt things, that was fine by her. It wasn’t her call.

But just a little over a week after Ben left the country for his round-the-world photography tour, Jordan found out exactly what was going on with Perry. They were back in his bed, and she’d dozed off after one of the better orgasms she’d had in a while, the kind she’d never gotten from him while they were married, and woke up enough to roll over and find him looking down at her again.

“What is it?” She wasn’t awake enough to be annoyed at the sight of him staring at her, but she was getting there.

“Nothing. Just go back to sleep.”

“Seriously, stop gazing into my eyes and tell me what you want because I’m not going back to sleep until you cut that staring thing out.” He blinked. “And don’t say it’s really nothing or any bullcrap like that. Just spit it out.”

“Oh.” For a moment, he looked _scared_ in a way that made her wonder about him. She was about to say something when he said, “Were you joking about that egg?”

“Was I what?”

“You said something earlier. A while ago, when I mentioned I was accepted into the hormone preparation phase, and then you’d asked me what was next, and –”

“No, I remember that part, but was I what?”

“Now that I’ve got the uterine tissue and there hasn’t been any threat of rejection in any of the tests, they can go ahead and get me pregnant.” Perry smiled. “And that’s the part I need an egg for.”

“And the reason you’re taking something I was joking about way too seriously for your or my own good happens to be…why me?”

“Because I know you well enough to know you’re not going to say no to a favor this big. There’s no way I’d ever be able to repay you, and I know you’d want that hanging over me for the rest of my life. Even more than the divorce and the alimony and these nights together, as much as I have on occasion enjoyed these evenings back with you for the sake of a solid climax now and then, you could call me up for _anything_ and I’d have to give it to you because you helped get me pregnant.” He kept smiling. “Besides me owing you a perpetually unpayable favor, I know you’re curious about it, too.”

Jordan hated it when he was right. “All right, let’s say I agree to this. How does it happen? I show up to an OB-GYN’s office and then what? Do I have to time my cycle with someone else’s, God forbid it’s yours, take shots on a regular basis and wait for the ovulated egg to be harvested?”

“My uterus isn’t going to work that way, it’s – look, you’re not the one getting pregnant, so it’s not going to be like a typical IVF egg retrieval. Yes, there’s going to be some tracking your menstrual cycle and a couple of shots, but they’re not going to need you to come in over and over, and they’re not going to put you under for the retrieval itself unless you want them to.”

“Just stick me a couple times and done?” He nodded. “Perry, you’re going to owe me _forever_.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“You know I won’t want anything to do with what happens to the egg after they take it out of me, right?”

“Jordan, I…” Perry hadn’t even looked at her like that when she’d said she’d marry him. He hadn’t even looked at her like that the first time they’d had sex, before or after. Perry was looking at her like he couldn’t believe what he’d heard was true and that it was the most touching thing he’d ever heard in his life.

“You’re welcome,” she said to wipe that look off his face.

“Right. I wouldn’t expect anything less of you. You’re finally on your way to fulfill your lifelong dream of becoming your father.”

“Just tell me where and when to show up.” She rolled over and pushed her way out from under the covers. “In the morning. Okay?”

“They’re – someone will call you.”

“Fine.” She went to piss, and when she got back under the covers, she didn’t bother rolling close to Perry. When she woke up in the morning, he was already out of the house, probably victory dancing his way to the hospital. She was losing her touch; she usually woke up before she’d have to do a walk of shame.

He’d left her half a pot of coffee, which almost made up for it.

After two cups, she went and took a shower, but didn’t head right back out after she got dressed: she turned the other way and walked down the hallway to Perry’s study. She hadn’t been in there much when they’d been married because it’d mostly been another spot Sacred Heart pushed its way into their lives. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to linger on in the house, because she didn’t. She wanted to see if there was something else that’d help her find out what she might be getting into, like maybe some of Perry’s prescription orders.

There were always medical journals around the house, and there were a few neat piles of them in Perry’s study because he’d always been neat in his space. Most of them had post-it-note bookmarks, and she flipped one open to the relevant piece on organ transplants and breakthrough drug trials, and another on advances in hormone therapies, and a third journal with something about measuring social attitudes among medical workers in regards to pregnant patients. 

Jordan had majored in economics but had taken more than a few pre-med classes, and she remembered enough that she knew the details of what happened in the hospital when people got their hands bloody and could read the articles and follow along and only occasionally consult a medical dictionary. She knew the background to what was going on and had some idea of the intended impact way off in the future. There wasn’t anything in journals, not in any recent issue of _Joint Bone Spine_ or _Guts_ or _JAMA Pediatrics,_ that had anything to do with the look Perry had given her last night. That had just been between Perry and her.


	9. Tell me all your secrets what is it you see

_Congratulations._

*

“Cox, party of one?” The hostess smiled. “Right this way.”

Back when he and Jordan had been together, before and during their marriage, they’d gone to Scott’s when they’d had something to celebrate. Cox hadn’t been back since well before the divorce: nothing had seemed worth making the drive out there for what might have ended up being just another meal. There were plenty of restaurants nearer to home he’d take dates to, Seasons or Bistro 37 or Brick House, modernist Bay Area-style small-plates cooking that he didn’t always think much of but tended to impress, tiny local hole-in-the-wall hidden gems, but he knew a major celebration deserved nothing less than a steak.

It wasn’t as though Jordan held proprietary claim to _everything_ that had been theirs. 

He’d taken a taxi to and from the hospital for the impregnation surgery itself, and even if he hadn’t been fully cleared to drive, he’d have risked it and taken himself out anyway. There wouldn’t be any drinking tonight, or any night for the next nine months at the very _least_ , if not more, depending on how things went. Hopefully more, if he was being honest to himself.

It’d been long enough since he’d eaten there that Cox allowed himself a look around to try to take stock of what had and hadn’t changed as the hostess took him to a table for one – something he almost hadn’t needed to make a reservation for, not for a Tuesday – while not looking like he was trying to take in the surroundings. The paintings were different, but the general lighting and atmosphere were about the same. As well it should be: steakhouses weren’t intended to change with the times except for superficial design accents. This much, at least, would remain consistent throughout everything, a comforting note of easy masculinity.

Granted, he was currently engaged in what might be the _least_ masculine act possible, but that didn’t mean he was prohibited from enjoying certain aspects of his gender at the same time. If anything, it made them that much more enjoyable for how much more aware he was of them.

Cox didn’t order a drink, and as wrong as it felt to go to a steakhouse and not have a scotch, it was even more wrong that there was a change besides the paintings: his waiter rattled off a list of the daily specials he didn’t listen to. He had no idea why the chef even bothered; the sort of person who ordered a daily special at a steakhouse didn’t have any business eating in one. But the rest of the menu was the same, simple and elegant, and he ordered the ribeye like always.

They’d given him a seat by the window, and he watched the sunset paint the clouds a bright tangerine, the river hiding just behind the trees. It was a nice view, something Jordan would have enjoyed, and as he pushed the bread aside to save room for the steak, he sipped his water and waited for her to leave his thoughts.

When his dinner finally came, it was everything a cow wanted to be when it grew up destined for the slaughterhouse. Just the right char, the perfect shade of pink, juices flowing out at the first pass of the knife and spreading beautifully over his plate. Everything about it was as it should be, as he’d known it would be. He took a moment to enjoy the sight and carefully speared the piece with his fork. But halfway to his mouth, he knew he couldn’t eat it.

Cox couldn’t even name _why_ he couldn’t. It wasn’t the smell of the beef or the sight of the disembodied chunk of meat on his fork hovering over his plate, and it wasn’t even the anticipation of what it’d be like to have it in his mouth, to chew it up and then swallow it down. He wanted to eat his steak. But something was stopping him from doing that, and whatever it was, he knew he had to listen to it.

He set his fork down. Sitting back from the table, he looked at the food on his plate. It’d be easy to try again – easy to imagine taking his knife and guiding the meat back onto his fork, biting into it and savoring every moment of chewing to get at that rich bloody lizard-brain-satisfying meat flavor. And he knew he’d never get even that one piece into his mouth.

The slowly creeping fear was clawing at him now – the fear that someone out here would look at him and _know_.

“Is something wrong, sir?”

“No, nope, nothing’s wrong at all,” he grinned like Kelso needed a favor he wasn’t going to give him, “but could I see the menu again?”

Dinner ended up being a side of potatoes, a side of spinach, two of roasted cauliflower, rice pilaf _a la carte_ from the barramundi main, the basket of bread, and a full pitcher’s worth of water. He skipped dessert, took the remains of the steak to go to save what little face he had left, tipped well and smiled the whole way out, and as soon as he got home, he tossed the box right into the trash. It was a waste of a great steak, but there wasn’t any point in letting it take up space in the fridge. 

He’d known going in that there would be inevitable side-effects beyond the obvious of having a baby, and he’d talked it over with as many doctors from the Study as he could manage – four, counting Hanrahan – to get some idea of what it’d be like from obstetrics specialists and people who’d been there themselves. There was a lot of BS that came through TV shows for the sake of cheap jokes and only a few commonalities that were likely to apply to him. But he’d definitely been warned to be careful about food, beyond avoiding raw-milk cheeses and making sure he was getting enough macronutrients. As much as he’d been braced for cravings, Cox knew he _didn’t_ know what it would actually be like until it’d happen. Now that it was happening, as he stood in his kitchen and wondered what he’d have to stock up on or throw out, he realized he hadn’t thought things would be manifesting themselves this way.

And that was about the stupidest thing he could have thought about this whole endeavor.

Two months ago, when he’d been accepted into the final pool of fifty candidates, with a uterus and egg lined up, he’d been so overwhelmed he’d actually considered hugging someone, and he’d been told by everyone who had the opportunity to corner him that he should savor the next five weeks because he was never going to be alone again. Three and a half weeks ago, the night before he’d gone under the knife for the twenty-hour implantation procedure that took four shift changes between two teams of surgeons, he’d been told to enjoy that last night of being totally, completely alone.

It was only staring up at the lights, with warm hands on his body, that he’d realized the _depth_ of what everyone had been talking about. When he’d woken up in his hospital room, pregnant, he’d felt a lightness that wasn’t just from the dose of post-surgery painkillers. He’d never be alone again.

The thought still made him so happy he almost couldn’t believe it.

As happy as he could be without the ability to sit down and enjoy a good steak for the next thirty-six weeks, at least.

Cox had another six days before the vacation time he’d pulled in after years of saving up finally ended, and he’d hoped he could sit back and enjoy it. But it took him barely two days before he was back at Sacred Heart ahead of schedule, the vacation days burning up uselessly. He’d look into maternity policy soon, get the Study’s lawyers to help out if need be, and in the meantime, adjust to a work-life balance and keep ignoring everyone making a fuss over him being gone while trying to navigate the mine field that was the cafeteria.

Maybe it was just red meat, at least. He couldn’t even stomach the thought of a hamburger, but a roasted turkey sandwich tasted just as good as it had five weeks ago. The thought of the containers of pre-sliced sandwich meats in the meat section of the supermarket came unbidden, and he knew at least one thing that’d be taking up space in the fridge.

“Hey, Doctor Cox, good to see you.”

“Keep walking, Newbie.”

“See, it’s code. He really means it’s good to see me too because it’s been a month…” Newbie kept stammering to Barbie and Gandhi as they kept on walking, leaving him – not alone, not so much, but _unbothered_ , that he could say.


	10. Well, I feel like an old hobo

_HR took it pretty well. I think Kelso’s managed to convince them it’d be good for the reputation of the hospital, grab the future and go down swinging._

_How were you planning on letting them know?_

_I wasn’t going to keep it a secret. I just wasn’t going to tell them._

_Them being…?_

_Not HR. My coworkers. I’d hoped to wait a little longer to tell HR and arrange everything, maybe be back at work for a week or so and then head down and tell them, but…why would I tell the rest of the staff I’m pregnant? Just because I’m pregnant? It doesn’t seem like a good enough reason when I don’t even particularly like most of them._

_It’s going to make your pregnancy a lot easier with them knowing._

_We work in a hospital. If they hadn’t been able to put it together themselves, they’ve got no business being there._

*

Carla wasn’t hurt when Cox wouldn’t tell her where he’d been: she’d been the only one who’d gotten a personal heads-up about his impending extended vacation before the fact. She knew he liked his privacy, he was perfectly aware of the rumors his secrecy would encourage, and with as little vacation time as he’d spent since she’d known him, he’d saved up enough that taking an entire month off was well within his rights.

Things were more hectic while he was gone, but she knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t have been gone more than two or three days unless he really had to go somewhere.

All she knew is it must have been good because after they checked Roloff’s progress and fluids, he held the door open for her and gave her a smile before moving on with his day, and he’d been back for a _week_.

“You’re _sure_ he’s okay?” Turk slid down the counter to stop in front of her. True to form, JD and Elliot were right behind him. “Because that didn’t look like he was okay, that looked like he’s on something he probably doesn’t have a prescription for.”

‘Trust me, he’s fine,” Carla said.

“He has been acting a little odd since he got back,” JD said. “I know it’s not my place, but – you’ve all noticed too, right?”

“Noticed what?” Elliot asked.

“Just little things, you know, he’s got this – aura around him now. When you stand right next to him, it’s there.”

“God, you’re even worse in love with him than I thought.”

“No, no, listen. He goes away for over a month, and I know if he came back singing and dancing,” JD sighed with a happy, faraway look before coming back to Earth. “Just, that’s not what Cox would do. But even without a welcoming dance number, he looks…well, he’s looking fine.”

“Fine how?” Carla asked.

“For one thing, have you noticed his hair?”

“No, because that’s just getting weird,” Turk said. 

“It’s been looking good lately.”

“How good, Bambi?” 

“Carla, I swear he looks like he stepped out of a Renaissance painting.” They all glanced over at Cox on the far side of the room, and Carla had to admit it was a pretty spot-on guess, assuming Renaissance paintings had people with hair that dense and curly.

“I’ll have to tell him that one. Baby, why don’t you say things like that to me?”

“Because, my dear, there’s no need for me to tell you what you already know.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“He up and leaves for a _month,_ and we just have to roll with that?” Elliot huffed as only a petulant white girl could huff, with practiced dignity. “And then he comes back all glow-y and painted and actually not nearly as bad as he was before he left? Where would he have _gone_ to get that to happen?”

“Maybe he’s dying,” Turk said.

“Don’t even joke,” JD said.

“Maybe he is sick. Maybe – he has a secret family back wherever he came from and he needed a month to visit to see his newborn child.” Elliot shrugged. “Or maybe he robbed a bank! And he knows he doesn’t have to be here anymore, so he’s only here because he _wants_ to be!”

“That’s pushing it a bit,” Carla said.

“It’s gotta be something,” JD muttered. “I mean – well. No, it couldn’t be.”

“Couldn’t be what, Bambi?”

“There’s no way he would’ve gotten in, but, all right. You know that study that’s all over the news?”

“What about it?” Turk asked.

“It’s not like Cox could be _pregnant_ or anything, so –”

They were all giggling and didn’t hear Cox coming, JD least of all. He was so surprised he didn’t stop right away, not when Cox had leapt across the room to grab JD’s scrub top, drag him to the wall, and slam him up against it nearly a foot off the floor, not until he was pressed there and staring right into Cox’s furious eyes.

“ _Who told you!”_

“Doctor Cox!” Elliot gasped.

“I don’t – look this isn’t – I don’t think you know what you’re asking, Doctor Cox, I was –”

“Don’t bother lying to me, Newbie, I know where you live, now tell me who told you or so help me I swear to _god_ you’re going to spend the rest of your residency doing nothing but bowel disimpactions, _who told you?_ ”

“I swear nobody told me!”

“Doctor Cox, let him down!” Carla tried not to shout.

“You really didn’t know?”

“Know _what_?”

“That…” And like flipping a switch, or kicking over a bucket, it all went out of him. The anger on Cox’s face disappeared and he let JD drop, took a step back, and looked around at everyone staring at him. 

Then Carla watched as he slapped a tiger-sharp grin on his face, hoisted JD back to his feet, and patted him on the face while cooing about what a smart little girl he was.

“Doctor Cox –” JD began.

“No, I’m _honestly_ proud of you today. I mean it! The bare minimum of information, just a _hint_ of inference from aberrant behaviors you’d only know by being the good little newbie that you are and watching my every move to anticipate all my needs – My goodness, now if you could transfer a _fraction_ of that attention to your patients that’d be even _better_ news than my pregnancy. Yes, Jocelyn, you heard that right. I’ll accept any and all congratulations you’re willing to offer.”

“Congratulations?”

Cox kept grinning as he turned around to face the crowd that was now all the floor’s medical staff and half its mobile patients. “It goes for the rest of you, too. Come on, now, don’t be shy, it’s my first baby, and I think some applause is in order, huh, thank you, there we go, _much_ better.” He took a bow as JD started clapping and everyone joined in. “Aww, stop, no, really – come on, keep it going – no, stop! And now I _mean it_ , knock it off, we’ve got patients to deal with, and I’ve got a child to gestate on top of that.” He strode up to the nurse’s station and looked Carla in the eye. “You got Wasmuth’s file?”

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.” Everyone watched him go, and Carla gave herself two hours before she went looking for him, two hours of some of the most intense gossip and guessing she’d ever heard about Cox, let alone anyone in the hospital. She’d been one of the principal eyewitnesses, so people came to her to ask for details, get more information, try to learn if what they’d heard was really true while she did her best to keep on working. When she went looking for Cox, she found him in Theresa Yin’s room, in the corner next to the bed and hiding behind a back issue of _National Geographic_ as Yin slept on after her splenectomy _._

“So they picked you to be a mother, huh?” She closed the door behind her. “I gotta wonder how strict their entry requirements are if they thought you’d be a good one.”

“I’ll have you know I’m in the ninety-eighth percentile of hormone tolerance _and_ they specifically told me that I have the exact type of aptitude they want for their candidates.”

“And as I said…”

“Carla, think about it, would they want someone _not_ crazy enough to want to be a mother for this?”

“When you put it that way, I can almost believe it.” She sat on the corner of the bed as he put down the magazine. “Just out of curiosity, were you planning on ever telling us or would you have taken a year-long leave after the first trimester?”

Cox laughed. “Remind me to thank Gertrude later for getting that all out in the open right away. It clears up so much. I’ll be able to go to Kelso first thing tomorrow and I won’t have to explain it to him, so that about makes it worthwhile right there, and maybe people will talk and maybe they won’t, but I won’t have to pussyfoot around here. It’s great.” He hadn’t answered her question, and that straight-faced tone was never a good sign. But this wasn’t a good time to talk to him, and there wouldn’t be a good time for a while – they both had more than enough work that this little detour to glossy magazines and friendly chatting beside a drug-sedated patient was pushing the day almost more than it could handle. They’d have to leave the room eventually. So Carla smiled as much as she could, as good as she could mean it.

“I’m glad to hear it’s working out for you.” 

“I appreciate that.”

“I’ve just got one question.”

“I’m due next March.”

“Not that, but thanks for letting me know. I was just – Wasmuth. You said you’d wanted to change her medication from benazepril to what?”

His entire face softened as he blinked, and Carla knew he knew she was doing a social lie because any other question would be too much for right now. A moment ago he’d been holding himself like he would shatter into smithereens, or blow up like a bomb, something barely stuck together except by spit and hope. Now, he just looked exhausted. As much as she was dreading tomorrow, she knew it was nothing compared to what he had to look forward to. 

“Yeah. Change it to ramipril, five milligrams a day to start and we’ll move from there.”

“I’ll get right on that.”


	11. Go west, paradise is there

_Hey, I was thinking – I’ve got a little time left before I can’t be out in public anymore, and even if I can’t eat red meat right now I can still, oh, have some pizza or Chinese food, and I was thinking there are a couple of places that don’t deliver and a few people it’d be nice to maybe eat a meal with while I still can, just a casual thing._

_I think going out to celebrate is a wonderful idea._

_Great! I was thinking of next Saturday, but if that’s not good for you –_

_I’m sorry, what?_

_Well, my Saturday shift ends at four, so I’ve got the whole night free._

_That’s not what I mean. I’m not your friend._

_It’s not like –_

_Percival. I’m your doctor and you’re my patient. I like you, but we’re not friends. You can’t just invite me out to a social event like that. It’s a violation of our professional relationship, and I know you know that. If you need someone else to talk to –_

_You’re transferring me to someone else? I’m sorry, look, it was a joke, I didn’t mean –_

_What I mean is the other mothers in the Study._

_What?_

_Some of them have been meeting with each other. I asked, and they said I could mention it to other patients of mine that I think might want to go, and it sounds like you could use it._

_Thanks, but no thanks._

_Excuse me?_

_Look, it’s fine. I’m sorry it wasn’t funny, but it’s okay. I’ll just take myself out somewhere._

_Are you –_

_It’s okay. You can stop now._

_Really?_

_Yes. Come on, already, just stop, all right? Just stop._

*

In his last session with Hanrahan, the day after the fact with all the media honestly and literally crawling around in the bushes outside the campus hospital hoping for a good shot and a quote, Cox had wanted to joke about the Study’s first birth being a lot of fuss for just one baby. But he hadn’t been able to, and now, sitting at home with the one thing he’d had the stomach to spend money on clutched in his hands – a high-profile peer-reviewed science journal as far removed from popular mainstream publications as was possible to achieve – he wondered when the last time was they’d put a person on their cover. That, and how much they’d had waiting and ready to print for the last few months because she’d only been born a week ago.

Susan No-Last-Name-Given, baby number one of fifty.

The Study had already released two photos to the news outlets to sate everyone’s hunger, but now it was time to let a few more out into the world. What he was looking at was, by any reasonable measure, a perfectly good photo – solid composition, clear focus on the subjects, strong use of light. That didn’t mean it was a particularly _creative_ one. A baby in her mother’s arms was nothing new, something everyone had seen before. That Susan’s mother happened to be a man was really the only thing that separated the picture from the millions of other newborn photo shoots that happened all the time.

Soon, it would just be another important photograph of something that had happened, like the moon landings, and like the moon landings, people would deny it and challenge everyone in the Study to prove they’d done it, and just like the moon landings, literally every news publication was covering it because they couldn’t _not_ cover it. Everything from _The New York Times_ to _The New Yorker_ to _The Economist_ to the local afternoon paper had it in there. Even the ones that he thought couldn’t have gotten away with it, like _Runner’s World_ , had promised and delivered on providing opinion pieces and editorials.

Cox had asked which journal the Study had decided to partner with beforehand, the one news outlet they’d approved in advance, and that was the one he had right now. The entire journal was devoted to Susan, her mother, the scientists who’d helped make her possible, and the work that had gone into bringing her into the world. He flipped through it without the words registering, just looking at the photos. Some of them were full-color pieces, some were black-and-white, and he looked and looked and realized with a sense of relief like a cold shower that none of the photos had the mother’s face. The man’s name wasn’t anywhere, either; he was only referred to by the initials _SM_ , “Susan’s Mother” – which weren’t even his real initials.

One of the doctors had offered to introduce him to the guy. She’d also offered to give him some names of a few of the other mothers who’d set up a little support group outside the Study itself. On the grounds that he his weekly check-ups with her and Hanrahan were plenty enough for him, he’d turned her down.

Besides the obvious, he didn’t have anything in common with any of them, and if he wanted to talk about what he was going through, he was already seeing a pair of shrinks.

Both of whom had remarkably flattering headshots in the _dramatis personae_ overview.

It was the sight of the headshots that made Cox feel naked. Even if the pictures hadn’t come with names, he’d still have recognized them. He recognized everything that’d been photographed without needing to read the captions – there was that one building on the main campus that Cox drove by every time he had an appointment, there was the primate research center from the UC up north he’d never been to but read about, there was the lab with the six cultivation chambers used to grow the uteruses, complete with a doctor smiling and Vanna White-ing it up next to them. It was all people and places Cox _knew_. People and places he could be asked about. _Would_ be asked about, knowing Sacred Heart.

The other touchstone photograph, the one of Louise Brown herself smiling at the camera as she held Susan in her arms, was just another photograph of a woman holding a baby. It’d still be in the shortlist for the Pulitzer, just because of who was in it. The thought occurred to him Susan and Louise might grow up to be pen pals, but he didn’t laugh.

Cox dropped the magazine on the bed and went into the bathroom for some water. He locked the door behind him and sat down on the toilet, got up, turned on the lights, and pulled up his shirt. Looking down, there wasn’t much. The implantation scar that made it look like he’d had a simultaneous kidney removal and transplant had healed up some, and turning to the side, there – that was his child. He didn’t quite look pregnant, but he looked _different_. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t hide it, but now it was something _to_ hide: a gentle curve to his former washboard chest, the first external physical manifestation of the baby’s presence. He let his shirt fall, and it draped like it always did. Soon it wouldn’t.

Anyone who saw him shirtless and already knew, which was everyone at the hospital at this point, would be able to tell. He’d hoped to have a little more time to keep everything to himself, but blame Newbie for screwing the pooch on that, too. Out in public, for now, all for now, he’d be all right for another month or so. Less than that, probably. After that, with the births in the news now – one a month or thereabouts, for the next four years and change – people who didn’t know would be able to look at him and put it together. But for now, he was all right.

Cox pulled up his shirt again to look back down at his stomach, heaved out a sigh, almost spoke and then caught himself. His baby barely had hands at this point, much less working auditory processing. There was no way it’d be able to hear him. He almost laughed and plunked back down onto the toilet and put his head in his hands as he breathed slowly and tried not to cry. Hanrahan had given him permission to call whenever he needed, and he’d been tempted to call at three-seventeen in the morning just to see if that was true, but he couldn’t call now. Not when he didn’t have a good reason to call. He’d feel better soon, he’d feel _fine_ soon, he’d stop feeling scared any moment now. Cox knew if he’d just wait a bit, what he was feeling would make enough sense that he could put it into words at their next session. He’d just wait, and it would be done soon.

An hour later, he unlocked the door and went to make dinner.


	12. Do you really wanna go on like this

_Have you spoken with your sister yet?_

_I called her to let her know I’m pregnant._

_But have you talked about this?_

_She knows I’m pregnant. That’s more or less the be-all-end-all of conversations I can have right now._

*

There was always a risk in picking up the phone before lunchtime, but there was the chance it wasn’t her mother and actually someone she wanted to talk to. Even so, Jordan didn’t bother to put down her morning coffee when she answered. “Hello?”

“Good morning. Is this the Jordan Sullivan residence?” the woman on the other end asked.

“Yeah, speaking.” She took a sip, gearing herself up for the standard do-not-call-list speech.

“Hi, I’m calling from the Matthias Study, and if you –”

“All right, I know this isn’t your fault for calling and I know this isn’t an unlisted number, so this is going to be your one warning. Now, pay attention, because I know you’ve got enough responsibility to at least – wait, you’re calling about what?”

“The Matthias Study, Miss Sullivan. Is this a bad time? Would you prefer it if I called you Jordan?”

“What? No, no, yes. Hang on. I’m sorry, I thought you were some sort of nonprofit solicitor. Sorry about that.”

“It’s quite all right.”

“But I wasn’t kidding about this being a warning. I’m going to give you twenty seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t hang up.”

“Because all I’m doing is calling to find out if you’re open for an interview at a later date regarding your role with one of the Study’s participants.”

“Didn’t I talk to you about Oliver already?”

“Yes, you did, and thank you for that, but this interview would be about your experiences as a father rather than the sort of informational assessment interview we already had with you.”

“You want to talk to me about what? Why? I’m not a father, I’m not participating; I just gave an interview and an egg.”

“In the context of the Study, the non-gestational parent –”

“Who the hell am I talking to right now?”

“I’m Doctor Peggy Shuman, and either Doctor Shuman or Peggy works fine.”

“Yeah, don’t care either way, Doctor I’m-Not-Listening-To-What’s-Going-On-Here. I’m not interested in talking to you again. Perry and I already went over this, and he got what he came to me for, and I’m done with dealing with his weird burning desire to _voluntarily_ have a baby and break all known laws of nature and I’m sure more than a few laws of man still on the books, so you don’t need to talk to me about him. You got all that?”

“You’re absolutely certain you don’t want to?”

“How many ways do you need me to spell it out for you?”

“Just the one, Miss Sullivan. And give me a moment and please don’t interrupt, thank you, and while we regret losing your perspective on the ongoing situation and the information you’d help provide, we also respect and understand your decision to not provide it. Thank you, and have a good day.”

“Uh-huh. Bye-bye now, okay, bye-bye.”

“Take care.” Shuman hung up before Jordan did, which was almost pleasant.

Three hours after she finished her coffee, she called Kath on her work number – who, as it turned out, hadn’t yet been called for an assessment of her status as a father.

“It makes some sense they’d want to call us that. Or you, at least. I mean, it’s not like I’ll ever be a genetic parent again anyway. We didn’t bank any eggs when they tossed my ovaries. Not that there would have been much to salvage from them at that point. But in any case, no, they haven’t called me yet. Why?”

“Oh, just curious to know how things are going for you with all this.”

“Not so bad. I mean, Oliver isn’t pregnant yet, so –”

“He’s not? I thought they’d be sticking a baby inside right away.”

“It’s not that simple. There’s all the assessments, the mental health testing, the hormone trials, and…he’ll be getting a baby stuck inside, as you put it, in a while. They didn’t need him to go right away.”

“Did they say why? They got enough he could wait?”

“Something like that.” She sighed. “He said that he was in the ninety-second percentile, which is good enough on everything to get in, but he wasn’t great enough on anything to really be amazing and have them get him pregnant soon. I know they need the spacing to monitor all the pregnancies closely. There’s only so many people on this.”

“Sounds to me like you’re rationalizing.”

“Don’t I know it. But what else is there to do?”

Jordan knew, but didn’t say, that booty calls were high on the list. It wasn’t because of the call she made her way to Perry’s that night, but it wasn’t not because of it, either.


	13. Hey, looks like sleep is here

_There would be some nights before he’d come home, it’d be – it’d be quiet. It wouldn’t be safe, not really, since he’d be coming. I knew that. I couldn’t know what he’d be like that day. Right now, it’s like – I keep thinking about that. How it felt waiting for him to arrive. It’d be quiet but it wasn’t safe, and eventually he came home and we’d deal with whatever he’d brought with him, and then we’d be done, but we couldn’t be done until he got home._

_Are you waiting for things to feel safe for you and your baby?_

_No. That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean I’m waiting for things to feel safe for my baby. I mean, and it doesn’t feel like this because it is like this, this is how it is for us right now, I mean there’s someone who’s on their way to arrive, and I’m waiting for them._

_You think waiting for your baby is like waiting for your father._

_No. I know it isn’t. But – someone’s on their way, and when they get here, everything’s going to change. Until then I can – I can manage, I can plan, I can do everything to prepare myself, but until they arrive, there’s just quiet._

_Do you enjoy waiting for your baby?_

_I’m looking forward to meeting them._

*

The Monday after JD blew Cox’s secret wide open to the whole world of Sacred Heart, Ted and Kelso marched out during rounds to gather up everyone who could spare a moment to listen, and to Carla’s complete lack of surprise, that didn’t include Cox.

“It’s come to my attention,” Kelso graveled, “that our current maternity policy has been – ah, somewhat out of touch with what is mandated by state and federal regulations. As such, Ted here, as well as a fine legal team soon to be appointed pending board approval, will meet in order to bring us up to current standards. Our new policy, along with an updated employee’s handbook, will be released by the end of the month. I’m mentioning this because I want anyone who’s already applied for maternity care through the hospital to know they won’t need to re-apply, but it’s highly unlikely they’ll receive _quite_ what they’d applied for, so I recommend making an appointment with HR just in case. Any further complaints can be directed at Ted.”

“I’ll be in my office or on the roof if you need to find me,” Ted mumbled before following Kelso away.

There was also a memo issued to everyone in a fake voice of good cheer how there would be a designated time to meet with the legal team with any particularly pressing concerns and issues, provided they were scheduled by Ted beforehand. Carla knew she could manage to make it if she got someone else to cover for her in case it ran long, but she offered to cover for anyone else who might need the time instead. 

“You know how it is with me and Turk,” she shrugged. “We’ve decided to wait until we’re married to even think about having kids.”

“Thanks. But why are you meeting with them?” Patty asked Laverne. “You’re not having more kids.”

“Because they barely gave me six weeks’ leave, that’s why. And that was _with_ me throwin’ in saved vacation time.” She shook her head. “I’m just tryin’ to make sure nobody else here’s gonna be crying over leavin’ their kid so early. Two months _minimum_.”

“I think they give you five months in Finland,” Carla said.

“Where’d you hear that?” Sarah asked.

Carla shrugged. “Around, I guess.”

She didn’t see Cox until well past noon, and when she did, she made a point not to say anything about what she was pretty sure he’d missed on purpose. He was still eating in the cafeteria, but he’d started staking his claim to one particular far corner of it, the one corner where someone could keep their back to the wall. Carla hooked her ankle around a leg of a free chair and sat herself down, not giving Cox the satisfaction of direct attention even when he nearly growled at her.

“Can I help you?”

“Just needed a place to sit for lunch, that’s all.” She smiled and took a messy bite of her hamburger to make her point. Cox glanced at it with an expression almost like he was in pain, then tore a mouthful out of his own sandwich and started chewing while he kept his eyes locked onto hers. Carla fought back by sipping her soda. She knew Cox, she knew expecting mothers, and she knew from teenage girls in cafeterias bigger and louder and even worse on people than Sacred Heart’s. There wasn’t any way Cox would make her be the first one to crack, which was fine by her. She didn’t need to care about being caught looking at his face, his skin, or his hair when she was sitting right across the table.

“Come on, Carla, what is it?”

“So are you gonna meet with the legal guys and make sure they’ve got moms of both genders covered?”

“Before this goes on any farther, and because I know telling you something is a reliable way to get information out to everyone in this hospital, I’m not going to be ‘mom’ with my child. I’m going to be ‘dad,’ thank you very much.” She giggled. “It’s a _title_ , Carla, not a biological designation. I could raise the kid to call me ‘doctor’ if I wanted to, but I’ll settle for ‘dad.’ And the lawyers met with me _first_ to make sure I wouldn’t have to talk to them later. It was really quite proactive of them to think of it.”

“So _that’s_ where you were this morning. Here I was worried you were busy with your patients, now I know you were just covering your ass ahead of time.”

“I’m promised excellent legal representation through the Study as well as Sacred Heart, but this was something I was pretty sure called for a personal touch.”

She shook her head and slowly ate her lunch, stopping halfway through her burger to add some more ketchup. After Cox finished his sandwich, he took his sweet time peeling his orange – except that she couldn’t figure out if he was trying to get a reaction out of her or honestly wanted to eat the peel because he ate that first before going onto the fruit itself. It might have been a stunt, except he didn’t look like he didn’t want to be eating it. There wasn’t any snarling or grimacing that Carla knew she’d do if she ate orange peel that wasn’t boiled in sugar and dipped in chocolate. He didn’t have _that_ much composure to not flinch at the taste if he didn’t want it in his mouth.

Carla didn’t get a chance to think about asking because as soon as he was done with the fruit, he was out of the cafeteria and back to work. Half the people in the cafeteria watched him leave and the other half tried not to be too shamelessly obvious about it.

Sitting in front of the TV at home that night, not ready to turn it on and see what part of the Matthias Study was being argued about tonight, Carla kept thinking about her mother. She remembered her sisters and brother as babies better than she did her mother pregnant with any of them, but she could still recall how her mother had always barreled down the streets without any concern over who was in her way because _everyone_ got out of her way. She hadn’t gotten any of the silly cravings they put onto TV shows. Carla knew every pregnancy came out differently, that they didn’t even all necessarily end with a happy baby and a proud mother, and she still couldn’t get it out of her head that her mother, when she’d been pregnant with Marco, had eaten grapefruit all the time and hadn’t even put any sugar onto it.

At this time of night, Maria and Gabriella wouldn’t be home, and it wouldn’t do Carla any good to call Marco and see if he remembered anything about being in the womb. But she wanted to dial up someone.

Turk picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, baby.”

“Hey, Carla!”

“I’m bored. Talk to me.”

“’Bout what? JD and I’ve got this thing going, but if this is a _bedroom_ talk, then –”

“Tell me about the thing.”

“You’re sure?”

“Turk, if this was a _bedroom_ call, I’d tell you I’m wearing something besides my pajamas. Tell JD hi and tell me what you’re doing.”

“No, it isn’t!” He shouted. “And she says hi!” Already feeling lighter, Carla smiled. “The thing’s that JD’s helping me go through this case report I’m working on while I’m helping him with a paper he’s working on, and _yes_ we’re working. I’m helping him with his sentences and he’s checking my citations. They’re probably all fine but you look at the same set of words ten or twelve times and you can’t care anymore.” She heard some bottles clink, and Turk said something with his mouth full that might have been about comas or commas. “It’s like we’re back in college, except I’ve got a lovely lady on the other end of the phone, and I know that when I’m promising her a good Saturday night at a fine Italian restaurant, she won’t have to be back at a dorm to beat the curfew.”

“Love you too.”

“Why, thank you.”

“Can you stay on the line a bit?”

“Baby, I’ve gotta get this done.”

“Please?”

“I could read you what I’m working on.”

“That’d be nice.”

“All right. So this is on how they’re looking into growing skin in vats for burn recovery instead of just harvesting it from the rest of the body, so, ahem, _Even as we consider modern recovery techniques, the pace of technology_ …”

It was good to listen to Turk, even when he was talking a little bit about the possibility of healthy skin being grown for burn victims in little chambers like something out of Star Trek. Just hearing his voice made her feel better. She murmured and mumbled at the right places to keep him talking and wished him and JD a good night when she felt relaxed enough to make a decent stab at going to bed. These days, she needed something a little more when she couldn’t rely on plain exhaustion. It’d gotten harder since her mother had moved out, but it went back to being easy when she had the night with Turk, whether he was here or she was there. Or if she just listened to him for a while over the phone.

The next morning, the third birth was all over the news. There was the little note that it’d happened a couple of days earlier and it was only now the Study’s doctors were letting news people in on it, to give the mother and his baby –words that wouldn’t have happened together like that just six months ago – a little time to rest and recover. It wasn’t as big on the news as the first birth had been, but Carla knew none of the births would be as big as Susan’s. She listened to it while she got dressed and ready to go, and the paper she picked up on the way to work had the birth on the front page above the fold. It was almost tempting to ask around and maybe set up a betting pool for when they’d stop printing the news up there. Front of the science section, it’d probably stay there, but front of the whole newspaper, the entire thing, that might stick around until the tenth Matthias Study birth and then come back for the fiftieth.

Cox didn’t look that pregnant, but Carla knew what to keep an eye out for – and taking a good look at him as she talked about Wendy Phillips’ current medications, it wouldn’t take a doctor or a nurse’s eye to be certain for all that much longer.

“So even keeping in mind the antidepressants, I think we’re safe with some clarithromycin 1000 milligrams a day for the pneumonia. Anything else?”

“No, I think that’s all for now.” That was enough for him. She watched Wendy watching him leave, and at least she waited until Cox was out of the room to start asking after his health.

“Is he…”

“Yes?”

“He looked kind of…”

“He looked kind of what?” Carla gave a faint smile without meaning it. “Just ask yourself, do you think it’s a question you’d ask him if he was here? If not, is it okay to ask someone else?”

Miss Phillips shook her head. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s all right. I’ll – if he comes back, I’ll ask him myself.”

Not the best thing, but better than behind-the-back gossip nobody at the hospital needed, especially not Cox, not right now. Carla meant her smiles when she made sure Miss Phillips was in as little pain as she could possibly be in and said she could go ahead and call a nurse if she needed anything.

But she switched off from her with Paul just the same.


	14. Come with me, I won’t hide

_I hadn’t been hoping one way or the other. I knew there was an even chance to guess right, and that I’d find out eventually, but I’d thought knowing as soon as I could would help._

_Help in what way?_

_Getting ready for him – I can say that now that I know._

_Yes. So, help in what way?_

_Anticipation?_

_You weren’t excited before?_

_No, I was, I still am. I’m never not looking forward to him. I meant anticipating my son, exactly my son, not just my baby – it’s a bigger term, my son. That’s something I can wrap my head around. That’s something I can say with weight to it. It’d be the same if I was saying her, my daughter. Being able to say what my child is makes the waiting less vague. More focused. It’s not going to be a surprise. I have some idea of who they’re going to be – not a full idea, I haven’t met them yet, but – you’re a mother, you know._

_I do. You were waiting to find out what your child would be before becoming attached to them?_

_It’s the feeling of waiting for someone specifically. I thought it’d help me to know ahead of time, and it has. Knowing I’ll have a son is helping me really connect with him. It’s the knowledge of him, not just the idea. Of course I’d be anticipating different things if I was saying my daughter. But knowing to say my daughter, or my son, gives me a lot more than just saying my baby. It’s helping me get ready for them._

_What do you mean?_

_I wasn’t disappointed when I found out I’m having a boy. I’d thought how I’d react if I’d be having a girl, and what it’d be like to raise a girl, and how I’d feel if they told me it’s a boy, and I didn’t get it right for anything. Some of it was just being told one way or the other. And I did – I was happy to learn I’ll have a son. I’d have been just as happy to learn I’d have a daughter. But a son is…I like to think I’ll know how to raise a boy._

_What about your child being a boy worries you?_

_I’ve never really been close to other men._

_That’s definitely something we’ve spoken about._

_I’ve had a few guy friends here and there, but I’ve been easy with it. There’s always been conflict, and there’s a lot of things men can’t do or say with each other. I’m assuming women have their own boundaries too._

_We do, yes._

_With men, there’s a lot of – for me, there was the fact that I knew it’d be…indecorous to get too close._

_Indecorous._

_It’s not something that’s allowed. Not for me. It’s allowed for other guys. Let them do it, let them do it over there, it’s not done here. Not with me, not with the guys I know. Friendships, sure. Friendly competitions, of course. Getting attached is right out. Well. There’ve been a few. I’ve been close to some guys, but I wouldn’t say we’ve gotten attached. I guess there’s Ben. You talked to him during the interviews, right?_

_I did._

_Ben isn’t the sort of guy I’d think I’d be able to be friends with, but we are. There’ve been a couple other guys I’ve known like him, in high school, in college – I didn’t stay in touch with most of them and I don’t mind that I didn’t because of what might’ve happened if we’d stayed on like how we were. There was this one guy in med school, he – we were getting close to getting attached, and it wouldn’t have been –_

_Proper guy behavior._

_Right. It’d have gone right out the window into impropriety, and it was better for everyone that the two of us never got too close. It’s fine that things went the way they did._

_All right._

_But I’m not…maybe if I’d had more guy friends, I wouldn’t be so worried about my son. I love him already. I do. But I worry I might not…what if we don’t like each other?_

_Speaking as a mother, that’s something you can’t know ahead of time._

*

It felt cosmically unfair to Cox when he sat down in the break room with his lunch – eating in the cafeteria was a fading memory – and the sight of the turkey sandwich he’d made the night before made his stomach clench up in such a way he knew it wouldn’t be worth it to even try. He’d even nibbled on a couple of extra pieces when he’d assembled it, generous with the tomatoes and careful with the mustard, all of it on whole-grain bread that wasn’t anything near the cloying near-cake sweetness of standard white sandwich loaves. But a good night’s sleep had somehow been exactly what he’d needed to lose one of the last few bits of meat he had left in his diet.

And he wasn’t feeling terrifically hopeful about the containers of chicken slices he still had on the top shelf of the fridge.

Cox almost wanted to see if he could try muscling past his gag reflex to get a few bites down, but there wasn’t any way that’d end well for him or his baby. The smell of the meat lingered on the bread, prompting him to toss the entire thing in the trash and brave the cafeteria just long enough to buy an orange and a pre-packaged salad. Raw broccoli didn’t sit in his stomach as well as it did when it was roasted, but it could sit, and right now, just sitting was plenty. He took his time peeling the orange and nibbling the peel and pith before going onto the fruit itself. The next time something like this came up, he’d have to send an intern or Newbie down for him. Five minutes in the cafeteria to get in and get out had been more than enough.

At five months, he was beginning to genuinely show. His gender took away a lot of the major reasons and indicators people used to identify pregnancy; his height and build covered most of the rest. But his baby was growing at a steady, healthy rate, steady and healthy enough to outpace everything Cox had going for him to _not_ look pregnant. It was growing well enough that at his last ultrasound, he found out he had a son – and even if he’d cried when he’d got the news, professional confidentiality bound the doctor and technicians from telling anyone.

Hanrahan had told him another one of the mothers had been telling people his pregnancy was a beer gut in the last few months; much as he admired the ingenuity of the explanation, Cox knew he was too vain to attempt anything similar. At least, nobody in the hospital had come right up to him and reached out to touch him the way they would with a pregnant woman – but then, he’d fully take their hand and arm off for that, whether or not he was gestating.

Cox hadn’t quite been prepared for how _public_ a condition pregnancy was, which was like thinking the ocean couldn’t be all that salty. He’d known he’d have to work to keep his space and person secure, but he’d largely been gearing up for ways to keep people away from his abdomen when he should have been taking into account the fact that Sacred Heart didn’t collect very normal people.

“It’s so glorious…”

“No chance in hell, Newbie,” Cox said automatically, not looking up from his chart as he swatted at where he thought Newbie’s hand would be – and startled when he _missed_ because Newbie hadn’t been reaching for his abdomen but out towards his hair. He looked hurt when Cox took a big step back, putting himself safely out of reach.

“Look, Jolene, just to make sure you’ve gotten your twice-daily reminder notice about standard you-me interaction policy, here it is: medicine only, no touching. And in the long-form version, no hugging, no touching, no handshakes, no touching, no fistbumps, no touching, no affectionate slaps on the back, shoulder, or ass, and _no touching._ The rules of the game are still ‘keep your hands to yourself’ which most people pick up sometime around kindergarten, but you seem to need a remedial course, so here it is, short and sweet: _hands off, back off_.”

JD clasped his hands together behind his back, but kept staring at Cox’s hair and gave out another dreamy sigh. “Like a lion’s mane…” He tilted his head to the side, effectively blinking out of reality for a couple minutes. Ranting at him would be useless until he came back to Earth, something Cox forced by whistling sharply.

“Get a hold of yourself. Like there’s any chance of you laying a finger on any part of me. You, me, space in between, natural order of things, don’t go messing around with that.” One of the nurses giggled. “What?”

“You talking about ‘the natural order of things,’” Carla said with a wicked smile.

“She’s got a point, Doctor Cox,” Newbie said.

“You know _exactly_ what I mean. Now stop lusting after human contact and go! Go! You’ve got these things called _patients_ who need you, so _go!”_ Cox grumbled at the sight of him rounding the corner and leaving, and felt slightly better until he looked at Carla.

“I just don’t think you can blame Bambi for trying.”

“I blame him for breathing.”

“Lauren,” Carla called over her shoulder, “how many people would you kill to get hair like Cox has here?”

“I’d be willing to kill many, many people.”

“Patti?”

“At least a busload.”

“JD was right,” Kearney said as she slid up along the counter to bump into Carla. “It’s a _mane_.”

“See?” Carla turned back to Cox. “I don’t blame you for getting mad at people violating that – that weird little territorial bubble of yours, but it’s some really nice hair you’ve got right now.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “My mother always told me that was one of the best parts of being pregnant.”

“My hair was the _one_ part of the whole thing I actually _enjoyed_ ,” Laverne said. “Almost enough t’make me think it’d be worth it to have another kid. Besides having another kid. But Lord, did it ever do a number on my feet. They never went back to their old size. Had to buy myself a whole new set of shoes.”

“It was the dreaming I always liked.” Mosthaf smiled at the memory, not glancing up from her stack of charts. “I’ve never really remembered mine all too well, but my second and third trimesters, both kids – every night. I didn’t know you could _taste_ in your dreams, but I swear, there was this one tuna salad sandwich on dark rye, but you can’t eat tuna, you know, so I had to wait – it was actually everything I’d dreamed about. How often do you get to say that?”

“It wasn’t just food dreams for me,” Lauren said. “I’d read about wet dreams, but later in my pregnancy – I’m so glad I didn’t have to do any major cleanup, nothing that I couldn’t say was just sweat.” She slid a chart into place on the shelf and looked at Cox. “He’s kicking, right? Or she?”

“I haven’t asked. And yes.”

“The first time you hear the heartbeat,” Lauren sighed, and Cox nodded and murmured together with everyone.

“When my daughters started moving? That, I loved,” Kearney said. “Kicking, rolling over. Even hiccupping. It really let me know there was someone there with me.”

“It’s the sense of smell.” Everybody turned to look at Cox. “I had to switch to unscented _everything_ , but it’s still so much stronger for what I _do_ like I really don’t know if I’m going to miss it.”

“I felt the same way,” Mosthaf said.

“What’s going on?” Maugham asked, dropping a chart on the counter.

“Pregnancy nostalgia,” Carla said.

“I know you’ll hate me for this, but I loved the third trimester. The whole nesting instinct, all the anticipation; it was every kind of horrible and tiring but I still loved the excitement.”

“Enid and I are going to be so pleased once this gets out of the clinical trial phase and Harrison can finally give us an honest grandchild.” Kelso chuckled from just behind Cox, who rolled his eyes and didn’t turn around. “It’s going to be a wonderful day.”

“Bobbo, the thought of your child reproducing and perpetuating your family line of vile, resolute, unquestionable horrors onto the world is almost enough to make me want to rip out this uterus and the child inside of it just to keep it from coming to pass.”

“I’ll tell him to name it after you. Precedent-setter that you are. In the meantime, the rest of you ladies can quit your gab session and get back to work. I need this lady in my office pronto.”

Cox growled, but handed his chart off to the nearest warm body – Barbie, coming from a patient’s room and letting out a little shocked whimper on impact – and strode off in Kelso’s wake, not stopping until he slammed the door to his office. Kelso was already seated, glasses on, looking between folders and handbooks.

“I was being perfectly serious about putting the pressure on Harrison to sign up for one of those.” He nodded at Cox’s abdomen. “It’s the last great accomplishment I could hope to see in my life.”

“Technically, it’d be _his_ accomplishment. And they’ve already closed the candidacy applications.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it. Come to think of it, Enid hasn’t used her uterus since Harrison himself. I wonder if it’s still got some miles left to it.”

“If you just wanted to horrify me, all you need to say is ‘I’m planning on grandchildren,’ not this elaborate pesudo-incestous, though very Greek, set of plans to make that happen.”

“True. But it’s always nice to see you squirm. Speaking of which, you’ll be taken off active rotation in three weeks. Change your schedule accordingly.”

“Taken off – what?” Cox sat down, staring at Kelso, who finally made eye contact.

“Listen, preggo. Whatever I think of what the Matthias Study is doing, what it’s trying to accomplish, however prestigious it might have been for you to be selected, what I care about right now is the fact that a pregnant man is still a rare enough sight as to be _extremely_ off-putting to the average patient, and your pride could well put that baby of yours at risk. I’ll not have that, and I’ll not see you deliberately tarnish this hospital’s reputation.” He glared at Cox, who tried not to smile for the delight of putting that expression on Kelso’s face, and managed by thinking about the implications of what he’d said. “I’d ask Ted to help out with this, but I don’t trust him for anything more sensitive than a golfing accident, and even that’s pushing it. You’re entitled to the full ten weeks’ maternity leave, however you wish to spend it, full daycare access –”

“As soon as it’s born and I’m back on my feet, I’m going back to work.” Cox stood and crossed his arms. “Put me on coma rotation beforehand if you have to, but I’m not missing work just because I’m gestating a child.”

“If only all the women expecting in my time as chief of medicine had your sense of moral obligation to Sacred Heart. Just check in with HR soon to sort out the paperwork.” He huffed as Cox left the office. “Mothers.”

Damned right he was.


	15. Wouldn’t it be great if no one ever got offended

_It’s embarrassing! When I think about being pregnant, about how I’m pregnant – see, I’m doing it now._

_You look happy when you smile._

_I am happy! But it’s not something you’re supposed to do in front of patients and interns, not if you want them to trust you as a big scary doctor. I don’t want to be their friend, I don’t want them to smile back at me, I want them to listen to me and be afraid of me. I’m not going to be the big scary doctor much longer, and I want to keep that for as long as I can. But when I think about being pregnant…it’s hard not to smile, but I can manage._

_Really._

_It’s – it’s actually not that bad at the hospital. I’ve worked there a long time, and the staff knows me there, even if we don’t like each other, and they know I’m pregnant so that’s one thing I don’t need to be careful about not mentioning or avoiding. I can usually manage it. And if I’m really worried about what might happen, I remind myself what would happen to me if I smiled in public, and that’s usually enough to get me to stop._

_You stop, just like that?_

_Yeah. See? It’s hard but – sorry. Yeah, I can do it. I don’t have to when I’m here, but in front of patients or anyone besides you, really, I think about what it’d cost me to smile, and I can stop._

_What do you mean by what it would cost you?_

_I mean nobody would look at me and be frightened. Not that I’m not getting more intimidating by the day. You should hear the farts I can manage, and at least that’s still considered fairly masculine. I mean, it’s more that I need to keep the reputation I had around the hospital before I got pregnant intact so after my baby’s born and I get back to work, I can start where I left off. If they look at me and see me smiling, then that’s years of effort building up who I am torn down to nothing. So, I admit it, I like smiling over my baby. But I don’t like it when I do it in places I shouldn’t be smiling unless I’m tormenting someone. I shouldn’t be smiling just because I’m happy._

_That’s usually good enough reason for most people._

_When they get pregnant and have to worry about not commanding any respect where they work, then they can talk to me._

*

When Jordan had first asked Kath to describe her experience with pregnancy sex, she’d hoped to get some amusing, honest reactions and maybe a few decent anecdotes she’d share at parties later when she needed some attention brought back to her, and brushed off any suggestion she might at all be asking for her own benefit later on. Even though it’d turned out she actually _had_ been, she didn’t plan on calling Kath to let her know. Only about half of what she had said was even remotely applicable to Jordan and Perry’s current situation, but at least it was the good half. The half about the person carrying the baby being crazy horny like it was puberty all over again, the half where the expectant mother had an ungodly sensitive sense of smell to the point where their partner had to shower beforehand with the least offensive soap they could buy, the half where cuddling afterwards was always a part of things.

Mostly, it was the ungodly sensitive sense of smell Jordan enjoyed. Not that Perry had minded eating her out before – he’d always enjoyed it well enough he hadn’t ever put up a protest unless it’d been a while since they’d had a good, hard fuck. But now he was the one asking _her_ if he could. Like she was really going to say no to the offer.

During the first trimester, they’d had to go easy since he was still a recovering surgical patient, and according to Perry’s warnings, that was when the whole set-up was at its most vulnerable for detaching from the grafting sites and abdominal cavity. Not the most sexy thing she could think of, but if it meant she got to be on top without any argument or debate, she was all for that. It also meant she couldn’t lie back and have him plant his face in her crotch, not without him swearing and shifting around every two minutes and never letting her get anywhere close to a decent orgasm, until they’d grabbed some pillows, propped him up – Jordan throbbing the whole time through – and let her plant _her_ crotch in _his_ face with her coming like a thunderstorm about three minutes later.

Now, midway through the second trimester, they didn’t even bother with the swearing and shifting around part, just had Perry lie back and Jordan settle in. He’d tease her gently, let everything get good and ready, warm all over and shivering for more, and just as he’d slide the flat of his tongue up over her clit, he’d slip two fingers into her, not one but two nice thick, long fingers, not like a cock but so much _better_ right then because his fingers could _move_. She’d run her palms flat over her nipples as he curled his fingers close right up in front, right at that spot just behind her clit, stroking her up and getting her close, rich and _full_ as she got close, rich and ready and _ready_ until she shuddered and came, and he wouldn’t stop as she pulsed around his fingers and throbbed under his tongue, and she came hard and _full_ and _sweet_.

Then, after she’d caught her breath and moved away, she’d give him a handjob and they’d cuddle. If she felt up to it, like when he made her come at least twice, she’d fuck him. Her on top was an easy position for them both, and according to him, it didn’t bother the fetus as long as it was already asleep.

The first time he’d said that she’d almost left the apartment right then and there: the thought that it might be _awake_ when she and Perry fucked. But he stopped talking about it when she asked, and they were able to go back to the usual angry sex. With the now-usual cuddling afterwards.

The foreplay was better, too. Jordan knew it couldn’t last, so she savored it while she could. She had no idea _why_ he was so set on his nipples eventually becoming functional, but it was something apparently on its way, and when that happened she knew she wasn’t going near his chest unless he had at least two shirts on. Until then, she could tweak and pinch and rub to her heart’s content, driving him crazy as he tried to stay still and failed and literally trembled all over if he hadn’t come yet. She could make his toes curl if she did it right. Perry was kissing her more, smiling at her more, even sometimes initiating the cuddling afterwards himself.

Not that the hormones meant he’d gotten any better at pillow talk.

“My feet have been killing me,” he said as she lay in his arms, hand up on his chest. It wasn’t the set of flat, firm planes she’d enjoyed months ago; it was slowly getting softer, a different sort of definition, as his body kept adjusting itself. She’d had to become careful. Her time playing with them would be coming to an end sometime in the next few months, right about when he’d be getting ready to feed another person and not just gestate one.

“It happens.” She didn’t look away from her hand.

“Yeah, well… look, there’s a… I’m getting some furniture delivered next week, but it’s going to be coming when I’ll be at the hospital. I need someone to sign for it. It’s okay if you don’t say yes. I can call and see if I can change the delivery time or just get an intern to do it, but I figured since you’re here,” he began running his hand up and down her shoulder, “I might as well ask.” He sighed. “It’s not a big deal if you –”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Wait, really?” His hand stopped. “Just like that?”

Jordan tried to shrug, realized she couldn’t move that way while she was lying down, and settled for shaking her head. “Unless there’s an emergency board meeting, I don’t have anything I can’t wait another day for. Yes, I can come by for a couple hours and sign for a crib. Don’t make such a big deal out of it.” She slid away from him and pushed herself out of bed, grabbed her pajamas from where she’d tossed them that morning. “I assume it’s going to be a crib and not some sort of pen or kennel, but who knows what’s coming out of you.”

“There’s a good chance it’s going to be a perfectly ordinary baby, but whatever I’ll be giving birth to, I’d like to remind you that you’re still partly responsible for making our child what it is.”

“Yeah, and remember our deal about not telling me anything?”

“Yes. And it’s a whole nursery set-up, so there’ll be a crib in there, a dresser, a – you know what, it’s okay. Good. Thanks for doing this. You’ve got your key so you can let yourself in, and I know I’ve got crap in the kitchen I can’t eat anymore, so you can help yourself. Just sign for the furniture and show the delivery guys where to set everything up. I wrote it down in case I couldn’t make it.”

“ _Guys_ , Perry?” She got back into bed, pulled the covers close, and lay on her side away from him. “Shouldn’t you know better than to pigeonhole by gender by now?” The jab got a brief sputter out of him, but it stopped and trailed off into a sigh that lead into a groan when the bed shifted and Perry began the process of getting up onto his feet. Getting back into bed was becoming harder for him, too. Sometimes she watched and almost found it funny, and sometimes she didn’t. Tonight, she stayed right where she was and just listened to it happen, imagining the faces he was making to match the sounds she heard.

She knew she was spending more time with Perry than she had since before Petey, but how much of that time was spent outside of booty calls hit home when she stood in Perry’s kitchen the next Tuesday at two-thirty in the afternoon, looking through his cupboards and his fridge. He’d set aside a couple of cabinets for stuff that he couldn’t eat anymore, but even if it’d all been scattered throughout, she still would’ve known what he could and couldn’t stomach. The whole-wheat crackers were off-limits for her, but the plain and the cheese were hers if she wanted. He’d used to take honey in his tea, but the little bear was in the forbidden zone, parked on top of an unopened jar of perfectly ordinary tomato sauce that, knowing Perry, had also become too sweet.

There were six different brands of yogurt in the fridge, two little Tupperware containers of leftover whole-wheat pasta, a vegetable drawer stuffed with cucumbers, peppers, and all sorts of big green leaves, a half-empty container of prune juice, and a sad little bag of baby carrots she grabbed and began crunching through as she dug around in the freezer. The coffee had been lurking all the way in the back, and even after spending months stuck there, it still made a damn good cup. 

Perry always liked nice things – nice cars, nice soap, nice coffee, nice coffee machines, nice coffee mugs. Jordan just thought of things like that as _things_ , stuff you bought because you enjoyed it. But Perry took it more seriously than that. He’d probably gotten some sort of super-deluxe hardwood crib that had safety ratings from here to Wyoming and could singlehandedly survive a nuclear attack _and_ eventually be able to be reassembled to double as pair of bedside tables once the baby grew out of it.

When the doorbell rang at three-fifteen, Jordan did, in fact, open the door to a five-man band of delivery guys in matching uniforms and what might have been a shipping crate of flat-packed boxes and a clipboard its handler clung to as he plastered on a smile. All of them did, at the sight of her. She straightened up and smiled right back.

“This is the Cox household, yes?” Clipboard-holder asked.

“Yeah, but it’s Miss Sullivan. Come on in,” Jordan said, stepping aside as they went by. Clipboard-holder hung back a moment to make sure she signed the right form.

“Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll get everything arranged for you,” he said. It felt a bit strange, but Jordan wasn’t going to complain, especially not with how they all _looked_ at her so warmly, even after she served them coffee and handed over Perry’s carefully handwritten notes instructing exactly where every piece of furniture was supposed to end up. It was the sort of warm look that always got her free drinks, and she was feeling a little thirsty today.

“Is there anything else I can get you boys?”

“Thank you, Miss Sullivan, but we’re quite fine here. Granted, we wouldn’t turn down another pot of coffee, but other than that, we’ve got what we need. This shouldn’t take us more than three hours, tops, so you just sit back, and don’t even think to lift a finger.” 

“Except for your coffee.”

“Except for the coffee.” He smiled, she chuckled, he looked her up and down all over again, which she liked up until he said, “I don’t know if I should say, but – it’s very nice to see a mother so proactive about her baby.”

“I what now?”

“It’s that in my experience, most mothers aren’t this invested in planning the nursery until their second trimester.”

Jordan crossed her arms and kept smiling. “I’d never thought about that, but you know, I think you’re right. I guess you guys would know, what with all the mothers that you see on the job.”

“More than a few.”

She made a point to laugh a little harder and show her teeth before excusing herself – tearing them down wouldn’t do her any favors, not when it’d mean she’d probably have to tip them and maybe cover the installation fee if Perry hadn’t already taken care of that. But she knew her heart wouldn’t be in it, and that’d just be disappointing to waste a good tearing on someone that didn’t deserve it. She began making another pot, let the guys know she’d gotten it going, and parked herself out of sight in the study, where she skimmed through one of the medical journals Perry had lying around instead of a newspaper.

If he’d wanted her to pretend to be the mother, he could’ve just asked. She might’ve said no, but it’d have been more honest than forcing her into the role. He wasn’t too far he couldn’t hide it with a big raincoat or a little defensiveness about needing to visit the gym more, and baby number four had hit the headlines last week, so there was some awareness of what he was going through if he couldn’t get them to stop asking him about things. Hell, he could even go so far as to say he was the baby’s _father_ and the mother couldn’t make it.

Perry wasn’t a surgeon, he wasn’t a department head, he didn’t lead rounds, he wasn’t supposed to be anywhere special today. He was just the chief attending, and he could afford two hours away from the hospital to wait around for some furniture delivery. Jordan knew he could have forced some intern or possibly a resident to do the waiting for him, definitely his precious little DJ with a minimum of effort. He’d written out all the directions anyway. But inviting someone into his home like that was too much to expect from him when he hadn’t even told Jordan what he’d really wanted from her.

Then again, the main reason she’d said yes to this whole thing was how he’d sucked his fingers clean after they’d been inside her and slid out almost dripping wet, and how that’d made her go ahead and fuck him into the mattress. Him and his stupid fetus.

Jordan tipped all the guys twenty bucks each, and the moment they were gone she went to check out the new nursery they’d left behind. True to Perry’s form and tastes, everything was nice, high-quality and well-made: hard wood furniture arranged neatly, plenty of space to move around, not a lot of _stuff_ yet, but she knew that’d be coming as soon as he got his hands on some catalogs. Besides the crib, there was a dresser, a changing table, another smaller set of drawers, but instead of the rocking chair she’d expected, there was a weird sort of easy chair and an ottoman set up off in the corner by the window.

When she sat down and the chair slid back on the runners she’d thought were extra-sturdy legs, the placement and purchase clicked together. It had a larger seat than a rocking chair with better armrests and a taller back, and was more comfortable than a rocker, a much gentler ride. Overall, it was more suitable for a mother built like Perry than a mother built like her.

Jordan had no idea if whatever company made these sliding chairs was hoping to break into the niche market. In the meantime, she pushed off the ottoman and started gliding back and forth.

The combination of bare furniture and blank walls reminded her of empty dorm rooms at the very beginning and end of the school year. There was always a feeling the space needed to be filled. Whether it was by you or somebody else, there’d be a person along, right now or in a little while – a sense of promise that it’d belong to someone soon, as soon as they came by and filled up the space.

Then again, someone was absolutely going to be living in here. A baby was going to be living in here. That was about all she could say at this point. Unless Perry went ahead and got everything in blue or pink, she wasn’t going to find out anything about who she’d fathered until they were born, and that still suited her just fine. She’d made him swear to not give her anything on the fetus she didn’t ask for, not even where to put her hand to feel it kick, and he’d kept up with that.

If he thought making her wait on the furniture for his baby was going to get her any closer to it, he was even crazier than she’d thought.

She jumped out of the chair, left a note under the paperweight by the phone, and locked the door behind her.

“It’s not like he _couldn’t_ have asked,” she hissed to Kath that night. “It’s not as though he doesn’t have the _capacity_ to do so. It’s that he’s too much of a stubborn-ass jerk to even think about it.”

Jordan couldn’t quite make out Kath’s sigh over the phone. “Pregnancy’s hard, Jordan. I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying he’s right. I’m saying his pregnancy’s got to be worse than pretty much everyone else’s. I know it’s got to be harder on him than mine was.”

“Are you defending –”

“If anything, I’m rationalizing. Sorry. Sorry. That’s not why you called. Go ahead.”

“Thank you. How was he at the hospital today?”

“He was the same as he always is, except pregnant. Why?”

Jordan sighed; she didn’t know what she’d been hoping to hear, just that she’d been hoping for _something_. “No reason. Nothing at all.”


	16. Well, I dreamed you were a small bird

_It was the weirdest – I don’t even know what happened. I know I’ve been on hormones for months and I know…_

_What happened?_

_Two nights ago, I was…I was in bed, trying to fall asleep, and it hadn’t been a bad day or a good day, it’d just been a day. Nothing weird, nothing sad, nothing all that joyful either, just a day of work and routines. And I was lying there, trying to fall asleep, and I started crying. I don’t…I hadn’t been thinking about anything. I was trying not to think about anything so I could fall asleep, and bam. Out of nowhere, tears, sobbing, crying. For no reason at all._

_That’s reasonably typical for pregnancy._

_I wasn’t feeling sad, though. I wasn’t feeling anything. I was just crying. I kept thinking, why am I crying? Why am I doing this? And I couldn’t stop. I just kept lying there and crying. It wasn’t attached to anything. It was just a lot of crying. And then I stopped._

_You just stopped._

_It’d been maybe ten, fifteen minutes. You know, not all that long. I got up, got some water, went back to bed, and then I managed to fall asleep._

_Did you feel better for having done that?_

_No. I didn’t feel worse, either. It was the same as before I’d started. I was a little more tired, but I felt the same. I didn’t know if I’d tell you or not._

_Why wouldn’t you have told me about that?_

_Why would I have? Look, don’t – let me say this, please? I know if I need help, you’re here. Not just you, my doctor Hanrahan you. And yes, you, Hanrahan you. I mean the whole of the Study is here if I need help. I know you’re not here to help me out with my grocery shopping. But you’re here if I start crying for no reason and want to talk about it, and you’re here if I don’t want to talk about it._

_Have you cried in public like that?_

_I’ve managed to not cry in public yet. A sniffle, I guess, sometimes. But not crying, not like the other night._

_That’s reasonably impressive, come to think of it._

_Thank you._

_But I can see why. You don’t want to lose your face. So you don’t smile and you don’t cry._

_Not in public._

_But you do in private._

_Yes, in private. And in here._

_Right, in here. With me._

_I cried in front of Kamil and everyone else there when she told me I had a boy._

_Here in the hospital._

_In this hospital. I try not to cry at Sacred Heart if I don’t have to._

*

Giving up grocery shopping and switching over to delivery hadn’t been as hard as Cox thought it’d be. Aside from the day he’d been kept late at the hospital and came home to spoiled milk and wilted chard, which to be fair had nothing to do with the delivery system itself, he hadn’t had any problems.

It was beside the point that it meant there was one less place to worry about people looking at him. What mattered was that when he got home at the right time on the right days, what he’d ordered in that morning or the day before was already waiting by the door. All he had to do was carry it inside and leave the soft coolers out for collection the next time someone came by with more yogurt. But only whole milk, and organic, and only from one specific creamery, and his baby didn’t tolerate any substitutions. As far as he was concerned, since Cox had already worked his way through the dairy case to find his preferred brand, nothing else was even worth thinking about.

“This is what you do to me,” he murmured. “Should I be glad at least it’s affordable? You could at least have let me keep chicken, but no, and now this is what I’m looking at for my protein. I know, I know, I should be grateful you let me keep eggs, but I miss meat. You’ve never had any, you don’t know what it’s like, but it’s good.” He began putting the greens away in the vegetable drawer. “It’s got more – just _more_ , more depth, more flavor. Sometimes it’s even sweet. Eggs and yogurt don’t come close. Not even mushrooms. Just eat the mushrooms because you like mushrooms, don’t eat them because you miss meat. I know I’m not.”

He sighed as he arranged the cans and the jars in the cupboard. “God, you should’ve seen Kelso today. I wasn’t even doing anything deliberately to him, I was – wait, why am I telling you about Kelso? You were there. You heard him, right? I know can hear things besides me now.” Cox didn’t even get a kick or a hiccup. “Okay, if you’re asleep, punch my bladder. If you’re awake and ignoring me, punch it twice just to get me to shut up.” He smiled when nothing happened. “You’re enjoying how quiet it is here. I know, I can tell. That’s fine, I like it too.” Dinner was an open-faced sandwich of sautéed mushrooms served with farmer’s cheese on whole-grain bread, something almost obnoxiously virtuous even for California, but the sort of thing he’d been eating more frequently the past couple of months as his baby kept demanding a stricter and stricter diet. Cox knew it was only a matter of time before something else got thrown off his ever-dwindling list of currently edible foods, and he didn’t want to think what it might be.

“You couldn’t have me avoiding pears? I wouldn’t have minded avoiding pears,” he said as he loaded up the dishwasher. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I can still eat them, I just think if it was a toss-up between pears and, oh, pretty much the entire nightshade family, I’d rather you have picked pears. You know, even more than meat, I think I miss tomatoes. Hot peppers. You have any idea how hard it was to find a good hot pepper growing up in Pittsburgh in the sixties and seventies? I know there’s a scale of what’s really hot and what just tingles, and there’s human variation for spice tolerance, and really, once I got out here I made up for so much lost time, but – all I’m saying is it would have been nice to have real hot peppers.”

He’d used to shower in the morning, as a way to get ready for the day, but halfway through the fifth month he’d switched to doing it just before bed. Anything to calm himself down a little bit, get him a little more relaxed instead of just tired. It also meant he was usually just enough out of it – the kind of out of it of being more than ready enough to just get into bed – he didn’t feel self-conscious doing his nipple preparations. There was a lactation consultant at Sacred Heart, and while he’d never worked with her, he’d at least known the profession existed before the Study’s doctors had asked him if he’d wanted one.

 _Get started right away_ , she’d told him. So every night, besides the self-examination to see just what his body had done that day, there was the massaging and pinching to get his nipples to stand at attention, the hand-expression to prepare and open the ducts months before his son needed his nipples functional. Thirty weeks into the pregnancy, there still wasn’t any sign of colostrum, but it wasn’t as though every mother followed an exact timetable when it came to lactation. Discouraging as it was to keep on waiting for something to happen, Cox knew his consultant wouldn’t like to hear he was slacking off on his exercises. So he worked his nipples just like she’d shown him, a few minutes on each side twice a day, looking right at his face in the mirror as he toughened them up to feed his son.

He couldn’t believe he’d ever thought this might feel good. It didn’t feel like much of anything.

What would’ve been really nice would have been if it felt at all relaxing.

Cox was getting to the point of actively considering homeopathic remedies, just to see if attempting them would be enough to trigger the placebo effect and help him get to sleep on troublesome nights. He hadn’t been able to take one of his prescription sleeping pills since he got pregnant, and right now he’d have cheerfully murdered, or at least driven over, pretty much anyone if it meant he’d have something that was guaranteed to make him fall asleep in under an hour. Even two hours would be fine. He’d tried everything deemed safe within reasonable limitations that his baby allowed him to swallow, which at this point ranged from god-awful herbal teas to loathsome ones, all of which smelled like dead lawns and overgrown, abandoned back lots. There was only so much exercise he had permission for and could also manage to perform, so physical exhaustion was off the table. General weariness and soreness didn’t quite make up for it; all it did was make him glad to sit back in the glider or lie down in bed whether or not he fell asleep.

Though on the nights his son wasn’t sleeping, either, Cox didn’t mind so much.

He’d gotten past the point of waking up at the slightest hint of movement – that first night, initially startled by what he’d felt, then happy beyond what he’d thought he was capable of being when he’d realized his baby was _moving_ , that what he was feeling _was his baby moving_ – but anything heavy like kicking or strange like hiccups was enough to get him awake. On the nights he was already or still awake when his son started moving inside the uterus, Cox did his best to relax and closed his eyes to better feel the movements. Right now, it meant lying on his side, legs curled in and arms under the pillow, trying hard to focus on nothing but feeling his son inside him. He was still small enough to fully somersault around, flip himself over and make good use of what little space he had left. It was the strangest, most profound experience Cox had ever had.

His son quieted down after a few minutes. Cox lay awake, waiting for him to get back to it, but he was done for the moment. Sighing, Cox shook his head and stretched out his legs.

“It won’t be like this when you’re born,” he whispered.

The next morning, after an obnoxiously virtuous breakfast of fried eggs on toast with yogurt on the side, Cox drove to work, went in through the little-used side entrance far away from most foot traffic, and stopped just long enough to deposit the day’s lunch in the staff fridge before heading off to the coma ward. 

Much as he hated to, Cox had to give Kelso credit where credit was due: things had gotten marginally easier since he’d moved off regular patients in that he didn’t have to fend off questions or return the open stares. Not that it’d been all that easy or pleasant to transfer his patients to other Sacred Heart staff, even ones he trusted, especially since he hadn’t given any of them the real reason for it. He’d had a good time giving each of them a different cover story, but that had only been good for a couple of days once the truth had gotten its shoes on.


	17. Thought I knew my mind like the back of my hand

_Bellinger and Ahmad tell me your son’s doing very well._

_Thank you._

_You’re doing nicely, too._

_It’s good to hear that._

_Have you settled on a name for him yet?_

_I’ve got a couple I’m thinking about. They really thought we’re both doing very well?_

_Yes, they did._

_They’re usually a little more reserved when I see them. I know how it is when you’re seeing your patients for ongoing concerns, don’t want to give them too much – what else did they say? Is it okay for you to tell me that? If it isn’t I get that, trust me, I do, but if it is, could you, you know…could you?_

_It’s reasonably okay. I’m sure they told you he’s developing very well, like any baby would want to._

_Yeah, they tell me that too. I was – did they say anything else about me? How I’m doing?_

_I could ask them, the next time I see them._

_That’d be terrific. I mean, I’d really appreciate that. Thank you._

_It’s all right._

_And because I know you’re going to ask, the week’s gotten a lot better for hearing we’re both doing so well at this whole thing._

*

Carla didn’t know how Cox could manage to _stride_ at thirty-four weeks. It couldn’t be his height since she’d seen tall mothers before and they’d barreled forward but not at all smoothly, and it couldn’t be any innate sense of grace he’d managed to cling to during his pregnancy because he’d never had one to begin with.

“You mind telling me what’s the emergency that’s got me pulled off coma ward rotation?” He didn’t even bother glancing at the patient in the bed. “Because if this is just a one-time thing, please, please let me know right now. I really do _not_ have the energy to start getting my hopes up about actually being a doctor anytime in the foreseeable future, and if this happens to be the one bright moment of practical work I get this trimester, I need to stop and savor every last bitter second of it, and oh goodness, thank heavens and all the stars above for the perpetual boundlessness of human stupidity, is this mister Joey Stuart, _the_ mister Joey Stuart?” He looked between the patient and Carla and smiled fierce and nasty.

“The very same,” Carla said. Stuart was swaddled up in splints and bandages and in too much pain to wave and stare at the same time. The wave came and went; the stare stayed. She looked away from Stuart’s confusion to her friend’s still-smiling face. “It’s good to see you too, Doctor Cox.”

“As glad as I am to know how badly I’m missed around here, save it for when I can enjoy it. This is too good to share. Tell me, Joey, are you _still_ set on deliberately breaking every bone in your body in alphabetical order? Carla, I’m glad to be here, but why do you need me? Even Charlotte could take care of this.”

“JD’s busy with the rest of the on-call doctors dealing with the Amtrak derailment.”

“Oh, fun.”

“You’ll be able to read all about it in the paper tomorrow.” Cox glared at her teasing, which didn’t stop Carla from enjoying herself even a little bit. “Don’t worry, Mister Mama I Wanna Be A Stuntman had nothing to do with it. But I did need a doctor’s consult, and I knew you wouldn’t be busy. And I knew you’d remember him from the last time he was in here.”

“It’s always nice to be needed.” He grabbed the chart off the bottom of the bed and began reading it. “Five months, that’s a record for him. I swear he’s only surviving on dude factor at this point – no major internal trauma this time, so that’s an improvement –”

“Are you pregnant?” Stuart croaked out, voice weak from the painkillers.

“Oh, no, _no_ , oh, Mister Stuart,” Carla smiled, waggling her finger, “I don’t care how good your painkillers feel right now. There are things you do _not_ just come out and ask, no matter how curious you are, _especially_ not to the people giving you medical care. Now, would you like to take back that question while we’re still feeling generous? I gotta say I feel sorry for your mama right now, not because she raised someone who decided riding a motorcycle for a living is a solid career choice, but because any lessons on politeness she tried to give didn’t stick.”

“It’s just…” He coughed gently. “I was watching _The Daily Show_ last night, and there was a segment about the work on male childbirth they’re doing out of the local UC, and –”

“Yeah, and I’m living it.” Cox crossed his arms over his chest, his folded forearms just resting against the full swell of his abdomen. “Any _other_ questions you’d like to ask that you can blame on the painkillers so Carla won’t have to punish you too hard for asking them?”

Stuart nodded. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at Cox who kept on glaring, and finally said, “How.”

“Is that all?”

“And why.”

“Good questions. Very basic, good grasp of the fundamentals of information exchange.” He recrossed his arms, swiping a finger over his nose. “But I don’t particularly feel inclined to think of you as a person I’d be at all willing to confide in under any circumstance, so all the _why_ you’re going to get is _why the hell would you ask me that_ , _for the love of god_. As for _how_ , my guess is that at some point in your life someone explained the basic science of general mammalian reproduction to you in words small enough even for someone who’s stupid enough to ride his donor-cycle on wet, slippery streets after one of the heaviest February downpours we’ve had in years, but just in case, I’ll just sum up for you: kid gestates inside uterus. Uterus is inside mother. I’ve got a kid inside a uterus, inside of me. Because I didn’t come with one factory-equipped, someone had to put it there.” 

“What.”

“Okay, you’ve just lost talking-to-the-doctor privileges.” Cox turned to Carla, and after confirming Stuart’s friends had driven him to the hospital and not EMTs, ordered a CAT scan to rule out a concussion and Stuart’s usual painkiller prescription.

“Thanks for throwing him my way,” Cox said as he yanked the door open.

“No problem,” she called as he strode away. Joey was still staring at him through the window, and Carla just shook her head. “You get used to it.”

“When.”

“Eventually. You should be out of here before then.”

“Oh thank God,” he whimpered.

She found Cox back where he’d been the last few weeks, feet up and reading something in the second most quiet room in the hospital, just behind the morgue, and then only if there wasn’t a craps game going. No one liked the silent beds of the coma patients, but at least there weren’t many visitors or a lot of conversation.

“Did you see the thing he was talking about?”

“Did you?”

“Yeah.” JD had made it his quest to learn as much about the Matthias Study as he could, and that meant more late-night news than Carla would have watched in her own apartment.

“Let me guess.” Cox didn’t look up from his copy of _Audubon_. “End of mandatory gender roles, destruction of sexism, obliteration of patriarchy, a bright shining hope for a perfectly egalitarian future. You see one news special, you’ve seen them all.”

Carla smiled. “Actually, this one was about men laying claim to the last unconquered realm of womanhood.” At least, that’s how JD had recapped it for her at breakfast, complete with elaborate pantomime.

“All right, _that_ one I haven’t seen much. Were there the usual points about menstruation and monthly bodily wisdom?”

“Mostly womb envy.”

“Don’t you just hate it when people actually pull out something they can _use_? Like I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a good dash of that to start with.”

That got her to laugh, nearly echoing in the room. “Trust me, Cox, if you’d ever menstruated, you’d know there’s nothing to be envious about.”

“Not anymore, there’s not. After this baby’s born, the uterus is gonna get yanked right out along with it.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “There’s no point in leaving it in there.”

“I guess not.”

“That, and the pathologists already called dibs once my fetus is done with it.”

“Yeah, I think I read about that.”

Cox smiled at her, shaking his head, almost laughing but not quite. “All I think right now is it’s going to be such a goddamn relief when this is over.”

“Keep waiting. You’ve got another month to go.”

“I could give you the days if you want.” He braced himself and stood up, no grace or easy balance at all, fighting to get onto his feet and stay there with his new center of gravity, sighed and stretched. From the front, straight-on and with the scrubs and a labcoat, he almost didn’t look pregnant. Everything was up-and-down, not side-to-side. She couldn’t remember if that was supposed to be for a boy or a girl, but she knew it was definitely for one of those. “They knew exactly when they put this kid inside and they know exactly when it’s coming out.”

“No, it’s okay. Just let me know when the birthday’s gonna be.” Carla crossed and uncrossed her arms. To hell with it. “If it’s okay.” Carla waited for him to look her in the eyes. “I know you meant what you said to Mister Stuart. But if it’s okay – I mean, if you don’t mind…” Cox crossed his arms and stared down at her. She stared back, then shook her head hard and fast, smiling like she did when she had to deliver unfortunate news she knew someone needed to hear. “You know, it’s fine. I mean, you wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t want it, right? God knows I wanna be a mother myself someday. I can’t imagine how much you must want it to go through all this that’s going on here. I mean, you’ve gotta want it more than I do, even.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“If you need anything else, you know where to find me.”

“Here or the restrooms on the third floor.”

“Speaking of which, please excuse me.” And he was out of there, striding away much more easily than he’d stood up from the chair. Maybe it was getting the momentum going that did it. It might be the lack of pressure on a cervix. She’d have to wait until more research data got out and there’d been a few more births.

Carla hadn’t wanted to push herself to staying up through to midnight just to see one episode of one news program when she knew she’d be able to get around to watching it in the next couple of days. With how JD hung onto everything everyone said about the Matthias Study, collecting all the journal articles and newspaper talk pieces, and going out of his way to get up early or stay up late to watch the dedicated interviews, Carla didn’t worry about missing anything. Especially not when JD had to work on through the evening and he’d given her his permission to use his computer at home. It took a while for the website to get everything loaded up, which was plenty of time for her to close herself off in the bedroom. She didn’t need Turk knowing how curious she was where her friend was concerned.

Carla clicked the little red arrow, and Jon Stewart’s flat New Jersey sounds began introducing a representative of one of the Study’s more prominent opponent groups, how glad they were to have her, and how they’d be talking about the piece she wrote for _Newsweek_. The first question was why she’d picked that publication and not something a little more well-established for science or psychological journalism, or even a newspaper. She explained she’d written it to address some of the Study’s social concerns, not the science, and the editors there had been more accommodating in providing her a given number of words per page.

There was everything JD said that Carla parroted back to Cox: how terrible a thing the Study was, what it meant for people in general and women in particular, the danger it posed for women at large. Stewart countered everything with quotes from the Study’s doctors and its mothers who’d already given birth, not quite arguing against her to prove her wrong but arguing like he was trying to get her to convince him, willing to listen if she had good things to say but not if she didn’t. How he wanted her to explain to him why it wasn’t just as important to study pregnancy as it was to study anything else in medicine.

Throughout the twenty minutes of extended online interview video, Carla kept thinking about how Cox had looked at her when she’d tried to ask him why. How she hadn’t had to get him that morning because there’d been a couple other doctors she could’ve called but he’d been so happy she figured she could get away with the little social lie of there not being anyone else. He hadn’t asked, so there hadn’t been any harm to it, not that she’d seen.

She had the laptop turned off and put away before Turk got home; when he climbed into bed, she pulled him close to her under the covers. 

There were plenty of things she’d be happy to be wrong about, but her friend wasn’t one of them.


	18. I’ve got a smile on my face, I’ve got four walls around me

_He’s been a person for such a long time now. He’s got so many opinions already – what he wants me to eat, what music he likes to listen to, it’s…he’s a person. I didn’t think I’d think that, and I know I’m not going to be a mother until he’s born, but it’s making me think about what’s going to happen then, how he’s – if he’s already so close to being himself now, how long will it take for him to be ready to be off on his own?_

_What do you mean?_

_He’s going to stop needing me. I know, eventually, that was going to happen. That will happen. He’s going to be taking care of himself, he’s going to see to his own needs, he won’t need me there anymore. No, I don’t mean babies change quickly and it’ll feel like one day he’s crawling and the next he’s asking if he can pick an out-of-state college. I mean, he’s already equipping himself for life outside of his mother._

_Do you feel proud of your son for all this?_

_I know I was proud of myself when I realized I was the one taking care of myself and my sister, not our parents._

_It sounds to me like you aren’t._

_I’m proud of him._

_Why are you worried he’s going to leave you?_

_Because I know that’s what happens. It doesn’t matter what sort of childhood you have, the one I had, the one I’ll give him. You have to let your parents out of your life, and it happens whether it’s a good childhood or a bad one, and he’ll have a great one but from how he is right now, I know I won’t be in it._

*

I wasn’t around when JFK got shot. I’m not old enough to remember Apollo 11, but I was able to see the Berlin Wall come down, and I’ll always remember where I was when I watched the plane hit the second tower. What Perry’s card was and the color of JD’s scrubs when he gave me my leukemia diagnosis. The light coming through the window when Dad died.

When I called up Perry and asked him what was new and he said he was _pregnant_ , fucking _pregnant_ ,I felt the exact same way. Everything in the Budapest hotel lobby’s phone booth was more vivid than it’d been two moments earlier – the grain of the wooden countertop, the whorls in the glass on the door I’d closed to get some privacy – and I said the only thing I could think of: “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“So – so how far along are you?” 

“Three months. Well, two months and three weeks.”

“Okay,” I said, staring out at the people walking around the lobby. It was early morning, and the city was beginning to pick up and start moving. People were waking up and getting going, getting on with their lives that were still the same ones from yesterday. Some of them were wandering through the lobby, reading newspapers, eating breakfast. They had no idea what was going on in my little phone booth. The hotel was a cheap place, gentle on the wallet, and it’d been easier to dial overseas from the lobby’s pay phones than try to wrangle with the phone in my room to get an outside line, and I had enough money left on my current calling card I wasn’t worried about how much silence there was on the line. “So you don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet.”

“Not until the second trimester.”

“Right. Which are you hoping for?”

“I haven’t even thought that far ahead. I’m honestly just going to be happy if I have a baby.”

“C’mon, Per, which? You’ve gotta want one more than the other. C’mon, share with me.”

“Really, Ben, I’ll be happy with whatever comes out of me.”

Something about how he said that, how bluntly, made me uncomfortable. Perry never dealt well with big changes: he’d try to get through them as fast as he could to get to the other side and keep on going. He and Jordan had divorced fast, when it came down to it. It’d taken them a while to get to the end, but once it arrived, they’d signed the papers and were done with everything right then and there. Things like that.

The thing was, blunt as he was, he also sounded happy. Happier than I think I’d heard him sound in a long time.

“So it’ll be a springtime baby,” I said. “Whatever it’s going to be.”

“That’s the plan.”

“I guess – yeah, I guess with this, you really can think ahead.” I looked around. “They’ve been working on this since when, the nineteen-seventies? Way back since Nixon.” He snorted out in surprise, and I laughed. “I watch the news, give me some credit here. CNN’s sometimes the only thing in English. I mean, I heard about Susan when I was in Bhutan. Everyone all over the world was talking about her.”

“Oh.” I could almost see him nodding along. “Then in that case, how was Bhutan?”

“Bhutan was nice. You’d have liked it. They put hot peppers out for every meal. Even breakfast.”

“I assume you’ve got a suitcase of polaroids to show me.”

“Nah, I switched to film a while back. It’s so much easier to pack up a bunch of little black plastic tubes than all those instants, and – hey, have you ever tried watching a bunch of tourists try to take photos of the same thing at the same time? It’s more fun to take photos of the tourists. _Quick, Melinda! We need to be the one-thousandth obnoxious person to identically photograph the Taj Mahal this hour! We’ll win a pair of slippers!_ ” Perry laughed, and it sounded like it came out easily, so I laughed with him.

I called him a month later from a motel in Naples and got a few facts about how the pregnancy was going – pretty well, all of it routine except for how it wasn’t happening with a woman – and then we got to talking about Italian food. Two weeks later in Ljubljana, I mailed Jordan a little dragon statue with a cute note from the motel’s front desk, then got a drink in the bar and watched the subtitled debate about the end of humanity thanks to these crazy Californians and their Lady Mad Scientists wrecking in God’s domain, beyond IVF and beyond gay marriage, because now that pregnancy and motherhood didn’t just happen to women, who knew what might happen to men. Because now that people could see some men wanted to have babies, because they didn’t get into the Matthias Study if they didn’t want it more than anything else in the world, maybe women wouldn’t want to get pregnant anymore. Maybe now men would be forced to get pregnant and have babies instead.

There were five men debating, and no women.

I spent a month in France, two weeks in Luxembourg on Perry’s recommendation and memories of the one big vacation he’d taken abroad in college, and then stopped moving north and began heading west. Iceland was nice, and I made sure to get Perry a souvenir from the Phallalogical Museum before shipping myself down to Canada. The boat ride went well, and I almost got myself into a house-swap with a nice couple from St. Catharine’s that we would’ve followed through on if I’d known where I’d be in ten months. Two, sure, but not ten.

All right, more like eight weeks and four days, based on Perry’s first phone call. An early springtime baby, like there was any other kind of springtime in California. I could see the farmland starting to come into green from the window of the plane, and I walked out of the terminal with Jordan waiting by the baggage claim just where she said she’d be.

“Couldn’t even manage a year away from home,” she said when she kissed my cheek. “I guess I should be glad you called instead of trying to hitchhike back.”

“It’s how I got across Ireland. You just have to remember to make sure everything you’ve got is machine-washable.”

“Ugh, you aren’t – never mind. I’ve got to head right back to the hospital, but are we still on for dinner tonight?”

“You’re my ride and my place to crash tonight. At this point, I’ve given up having a say in things.”

“Finally,” she sighed, and I punched her on the shoulder. “Hey, no dead arms if I’m driving.”

“You wanna hit me back? Go ahead, you can – ow! Not for reals, Jordan.”

“So how long are you sticking around?”

“Couple months, why?” I asked as we got into her car and began driving home.

“You’ve been in touch with Perry?”

“Due date’s the twenty-first. Eyes on the road.”

“But – why would he – you shouldn’t even _know_. What did –”

“Relax, he told me.”

“Of course he did,” she seethed. Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel, and I couldn’t even guess why she was so upset. “When I get to him –”

“Look, Jordan, _he_ told _me_. If there’s something more important going on right now than Perry being pregnant, I don’t know what it could be.”

“Wait. That’s all you know? He’s having a baby?”

“Yeah. He said he wasn’t telling me the sex, but wouldn’t tell me why. I guess he thought it’d make it –” 

“If you knew, you’d have told me,” she said. The way her voice caught on her words, like she had to force them out, made me look at her. I almost never saw Jordan so sharp and upset. “You might have told me, and I asked him not to let me know at all.”

“I don’t see why it’d be a big deal for you to know one way or the other.”

“Yeah. Well.” She swallowed. “It wouldn’t.”

Something was going more than a little wrong, and I shook my head to try to get past it. “I _might_ not have told you.”

“Might not have.”

“Come on, I’m jet-lagged here. Give me some credit.”

“You flew in from New Hampshire.”

“While it’s not as bad as it could be, the circadian rhythms haven’t yet – would you just cut the crap and tell me what’s bothering you about this?”

She growled from her diaphragm and hit the brakes at the intersection a bit too hard for it to be on accident. When the light turned green and she went back to driving, Jordan finally said, “I’d asked him not to tell me anything about the baby. So he didn’t tell you anything.”

“Perry was thoughtful about you for a change. That’s what’s bothering you. I wouldn’t think his thinking of you would be a problem, not when it put you first in his mind which is one of the places I know you love to be. Unless that right there is what’s bothering you. Maybe if he _hadn’t_ tried to keep you in mind, you’d –”

“Ben.” She still looked sharp, but a different kind of upset. Not at me: at herself.

Then she told me. She didn’t tell me everything because she didn’t know if she’d be having a son or a daughter, but she told me she’d find out when Perry gave birth. She told me she hadn’t wanted to know and still didn’t because she didn’t want to care or have Perry think she did. She told me they’d been back to little of the old _come back to my place bouncy-bouncy_ since before I’d been in chemo, that Perry had asked her for an egg and she’d said _yes_ and she hadn’t stopped fucking him or thinking about what and who he was still gestating. She hated how much Perry’s pregnancy made her care about another person because she spent so much of her time trying to keep herself safe from feeling anything vulnerable. This feeling was new and scary for her, and with the baby less than two weeks away, it was getting even harder for her to try to deal with.

Jordan didn’t say the last parts out loud, but I knew they were there.

My sister and my best friend were having a baby together, and Jordan hadn’t wanted to know because she didn’t want to care. Because that was Jordan. But I didn’t blame her for it. I just reached over and turned on the radio for the last twenty minutes of the drive, and in the last five minutes, she started singing along with me.

Once we got to Sacred Heart, she disappeared off for the day’s board meetings, and I followed her instructions on how to find Perry. 

It always felt weird to visit Sacred Heart – it was where my dad had worked, and then where he went when he got sick, then where Mom joined the Board, and Jordan after her, and then it was where _I_ went when I got sick. The only thing it felt like was when I’d been a kid and biked through the college’s campus when classes had been in session. All the activity going on, and none of it about me. It _had_ been about me for a while. But now it wasn’t, and right now it felt more like walking through the high school campus during summer vacation when I knew classes would start in fall, but that was also getting close without really getting there. Whatever else it felt like, it was comfortable to walk down the hallways and see the light falling on the tiled floors again, move past a janitor talking in code into a Walkie-Talkie, push open the doors into the coma ward and see my friend.

“Hey, Per,” I said.

He looked up from his patient and smiled, and I’d seen it on the news, I’d seen the newspapers and magazines and the first trashy airport nonfiction bestseller, and I knew seeing Perry would be different because it wasn’t just some guy who’d volunteered for the single biggest medical breakthrough in human history, it was my friend. And it _was_ different. It was more real and surreal than I’d have ever guessed.

But it also looked more _right_ than I’d ever imagined it would.

“So how do I hug you?”

“Carefully. No, not – just get in here from the side,” he laughed, and I wrapped my arms around him tight. From the angle we were in, my nose was right in his hair. I went for broke with that, nuzzling it and taking a huge, loud sniff. “Jesus, Ben!”

“Are you using a new shampoo?” I nuzzled again, and he shook his head, leaned away, and we broke at the same time. He laughed, and I chuckled. “Good to see you. And whoever you are in there,” I crouched down to face-level with his belly. “Another eleven days and I get to meet you.” I looked up at him as puppy-dog as I could make it and held out a hand. “Can I?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Will you let me hold them after they’re born?” He crossed his arms over his chest, sighed, and nodded. “All right. I can wait.”

“It isn’t happening soon enough at this point. Come on, I’ve got an extra chair and these guys aren’t going anywhere.”

We spent the next two hours talking, filling the room of sixteen silent beds. World-shattering mad scientist antics aside, Perry was my best friend, and we hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in over a year. Being in the same room as him and seeing his face when he laughed was just as good as I’d remembered it being. It wasn’t everything I wanted out of this visit home, but it was what I wanted right now. Wanting in the _right now_ was something I’d learned to do during chemo. I still want in the _soon coming_ and _way ahead_ , but the _right now_ isn’t as easy to want as most people say it is. It’s too easy to get caught up in how things might be somewhere else, or in any of the other kinds of wanting.

I didn’t ask about Perry’s pregnancy unless he said something first, and I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know about pregnancies in general and men’s in particular – his feet hurt, who’d have expected that, someone call Ripley’s – but I did learn something about the circumstances of his pregnancy when we were getting ready to leave and he turned to me as a deliberate afterthought that he tried to make light by pretending it’d slipped his mind.

“Hey, you’re staying for a couple of weeks, right?”

“At least three, yeah.”

“I’m just wondering, if you’re not busy on Friday, would you be willing – I need a ride out to the campus and the hospital, and I’d ask Jordan but since you’re here, I figured…I can just get a cab or a car service if you’re not, so it’s no –”

“I’d love to, yeah.”

“Great.” He actually smiled at that. “I’ll call them tonight and have them put your name on the list.”

“Have them what?”

“Are you ready to go yet?” Jordan asked, not even breaking her stride as she walked in the room to corral and collect me. “Come on, Ben, Danni just called me and she’s already past the blueberry stand.” 

“Great, just an hour before she gets home.” I’d talked to Danni a few days earlier, and she’d said she’d be coming by and staying for as long as I was, but I didn’t think she’d be coming in the same day as me. She’d been good about not smoking near me when I’d been on chemo, but even that hadn’t gotten her to quit, not going by the smell of her hair whenever we’d hugged. 

It would’ve been nice to eat out in a fancy place with tablecloths and silverware, but it was even better to just dig into pizza at Jordan’s, eating off paper plates and laughing on the living room floor.

I gave my sisters my first couple of days back in California, gave Mom my nights on the phone, took the mornings and evenings to myself at my old apartment, and didn’t feel bad about just having a couple of short calls with Perry because he was getting as much of Friday as we could pull together.

“Hey.” We hugged at an angle again when he answered the door, but I left his hair alone this time. “Ready to go?”

“Just give me a minute.”

“Sure.” The front room looked about the same, and I knew whatever else there might be to find out I’d have to wait on since I wasn’t about to go exploring Perry’s house when he was slinging a messenger bag over his shoulder and handing me directions to the campus hospital. It was a place I’d walked past a million times but hadn’t ever gone inside. In our family, it’d only ever been Sacred Heart. 

Then he handed me his Porsche’s keys.

“ _I’m_ not driving like this.”

“Let this be a day of firsts!” I raised them in the air. “New horizons, new adventures, locomotive options previously unconsidered, nay, _undreamed_ of! I’m ready to go if you are.” 

He laughed. “Just pull it around front, okay?”

“ _Verrah_ good, sir.”

I tried not to be too careful about not watching him on the drive over. When I’d been in chemo, everyone had been careful around me and I’d hated that. I could’ve dealt with it if they’d just be honest about what they’d wanted and what they’d been thinking, but I couldn’t deal with all the pretending. So I kept my eyes on the road and didn’t look at Perry. He’d been walking fine, and got into the car fine, and handled the car moving fine. We talked about the fact that I hadn’t been getting check-ups while traveling, and how work was going for him, and I found out what he’d meant about getting me on the list when we got to a little security gate I couldn’t remember seeing in the campus hospital’s parking lot. The guard checked my ID against the book she had and then let us in, and we had to get through another guard checkpoint inside the hospital, with another photo ID confirmation I was who I was saying I was, before we got in the door. They had me go through an old-school airport metal detector, but waved Perry on inside.

“Is all that necessary?” I asked when I started filling out the visitor’s forms.

“It’s a lot better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.” He groaned softly as he eased himself down into a chair, bracing himself on the armrests. It was a pastel blue semi-cushy chair with a wooden frame, the kind you always had to slouch in or sit just on the edge of the seat. All the chairs in the room were like that, just different pastels. The little tables were basically wooden cubes, and the art on the wall was aggressively bland landscapes, and the light was the off-fluorescent of all doctor’s waiting rooms.

“I guess with something like what you’re doing, I can get that.” I signed my name again, scanning the documents in case I was agreeing to sign up for something like a caudal appendage testing program. Which would’ve been pretty neat – I’d always wanted a tail like Nightcrawler’s when I was a kid. “I guess I didn’t think much about the place all this happened in. Labs and doctors, sure, and I saw all the pictures when Susan was born, but…being in it, it’s kind of weird.”

Buildings that looked almost exactly like the ones I went to undergrad classes in didn’t seem like they needed so many levels of security. Friendly, unassuming buildings like this were for classrooms and offices and the college library, not the place people went to develop male pregnancies. But because everything was a University of California building, they looked exactly the same on the outside. Even so, after all that fuss of getting inside, I’d have thought the inside would look more like the future. But the room looked like it hadn’t changed since the building went up.

“What do you mean? Not enough labcoats for your fantasy?”

“No, I’m sure the labcoats are coming. It’s more…they’re supposed to be making the future in here.” He nodded for me to keep going. “It doesn’t look like the future. It doesn’t even look like the present in here. It just – you know what this place looks like? It’s what the Seventies thought the Nineties would look like.”

For some reason, that got Perry to laugh. Watching him smile even as miserable as he looked made me feel better about the day. I didn’t have a book with me, and there were a lot of things I couldn’t photograph, but I had a visitor’s pass sponsored by one of the Matthias Study’s participants and could wander almost freely when the labcoats finally arrived to collect Perry for his check-ups. He’d be back again next Thursday, getting checked in the day before the birth, and I knew the next time I came by I’d definitely bring a book. I waited, read the magazines, talked to some of the doctors and went outside and took a couple pictures of the building, walked around a bit, got treated to a cup of coffee in the staff lounge by a nurse with some great stories about her children, and by then Perry was ready to head home. He looked a lot more tired than when we’d come in, and from what he told me about the routine physicals and doctor’s appointments, they were always like that. I didn’t ask him how he felt, just if he wanted me to bring the car right to the door to pick him up the same way I’d dropped him off.

“So what goes on in there?”

“Tests, more tests, even more tests, another round of tests to make sure those first tests were accurate, a lot of peeing into cups, less bloodletting than there was a year ago, the standard pregnancy routine, male or female.”

“Yeah-huh.” I waved at the guard, who lifted the gate to let us out. Perry sounded worn-out and sore enough I didn’t bother trying, not until we were back at the house and he plugged in the kettle and set it to boil. I was willing to cut him that much slack, at least. I watched him get out two mugs and drop a teabag into both, and when he finally slumped down into a chair, I let him have it.

“Okay, Perry, I’ve never been pregnant, but I know what it’s like to go into a hospital on a regular basis and tell people you’re still as bad as you were last time, and I know how much it sucks to be sick for a long time. I mean – okay. I’m not saying you’re sick, that’s on me. And I’m not saying I know what you’re going through. I’m saying I understand you’re feeling more than a little crappy right now, to put it lightly, even if I don’t know the specific _kind_ of crappy, so you can drop the stoic manly man routine and just tell me _how_ bad you’re feeling.”

“There’s no routine, Ben,” he sighed, sounding worn-out and sore. “There’s nothing to _say_. I’m pregnant. Next week, I’m not going to be. So forgive me if I don’t feel like talking about what I’m going through when I’m a week away from _giving birth_.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I know you are, so if you don’t mind I’d really like this – ehgh.”

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing. Sorry. It’s that when, _hnnghh_.” He sucked in a breath, leaned his head back and rubbed his eyes. “The baby’s big enough now that when it moves, sometimes I – wait a minute, what am I saying? You can see it.”

“I can what?”

“You can see it. See? There – right there.” He stood and pulled up his hockey jersey and at first all I could see was his enormous pink pregnant belly with a flattened navel that was covered in hair and stretch marks, and majestic a sight as it was, I was about to say he should put it away, but then it _moved_. From the _inside_. I hadn’t even known you could _see_ the baby kick from outside but here it was, _there_ it was I should say, kicking hard enough for both me and Perry to know about it. Kicking and alive. 

“Holy _fuck_.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s really a baby in there.”

“I know.”

“But – there’s a _baby_ in there.”

“You think that’s something?” He didn’t even wait for me to say anything, just grabbed my hand and practically slammed it onto his belly, and I almost flinched away, but I was there just in time for the baby to kick me. Not hard, not hard enough to hurt, but – but _still_.

“Oh sweet mother of pearl.”

“You should feel it from the inside.”

“Goddamn.”

“Yeah, that too. Okay, enough.” He flung my hand off his belly, and I knew that was that. I could guess he’d let me touch as much as I had so I’d leave him alone instead of keep on trying to get him to tell me how he was doing. But I was okay with that, since I figured I could say, “I’ve got another question.”

“Go ahead.”

“The birth’s scheduled ahead of time, right?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I was just wondering about that. Why that is.”

“Why it’s scheduled? I don’t have anything that’ll see me going into labor – at least not outside of an even bigger leap in medicine than the one that got me pregnant. I don’t have a cervix or any sort of, and god help me for saying this, birth canal. The baby’s not coming out through any orifice, the baby’s coming out through a Cesarean.”

“Right. It’s that, does it have to happen the day you picked out? What happens if it’s a day early or late?”

“I didn’t pick it out, my doctors did. And probably nothing, but no one wants me to wait too long.”

“Why’s that?” The kettle started to call, and a moment later the kitchen was full of the smell of empty, open fields at the end of summer. I took a deep breath of my tea, savoring it, and I could almost hear the grass shaking in the wind. “What happens if it’s delayed?”

“Nobody’s delayed a birth to find out, but the current hypothesis is that the placenta senesces, the baby drowns in the amniotic fluids, and I die of sepsis.”

“Yeah, I can see why you’d want to avoid that.”

Jordan came over for dinner a few hours later. We hadn’t invited her, but she came anyway. I guess when you’re having a baby with someone and also having sex with them on a regular basis, you get to come and go in and out of their life as much as you want. The first thing she did was make a beeline for Perry’s liquor.

“See, I _know_ I’ve got a ride home with the designated driver, and I wish I could say I’m sorry neither of you is drinking any of this, but really, scotch this good can’t wait until the baby’s done weaning.”

“And the fact that neither of us is drinking any for reasons that include pregnancy and an increased sense of maintaining one’s well-being after successfully being treated for cancer has nothing to do with how much pleasure you’re taking over my scotch.”

“None whatsoever, Perry.”

“Well, so long as we’re clear on that,” I said. “You know I _could_ have a drink right now.”

“I’m sure your liver’s recovered enough to sustain you through as many as three drinks tonight, but you’ve been claimed as the sacrificial designated driver. And I’m not leaving my house again tonight, so don’t even think of looking my way.” He swiped a finger over his nose and crossed his arms. “I’m going to get started on dinner, so you two go ahead and amuse yourselves.”

“What are we having?”

“I’ll be having a dinner that fulfills the specifications of the few foods my baby still allows me to eat. _You_ will be having whatever I’ve got in the freezer for nights such as this one.”

“He means when we have sex.”

“I’m sure he did, Jordan.” I followed Perry into the kitchen anyway. There was basically nothing in the fridge but yogurt and eggs and some greens he pulled out from the crisper. I checked the freezer while he began washing them, and next to the boxes of frozen dinners and neatly stacked Tupperware containers were a few half-full syringes of an opaque, taupe-ish liquid. “Hey, what’s this?” I held one up to show to Perry, who glanced at it before going back to the colander.

“Colostrum. Now put it back.”

“Sure, but what is it?”

“I’m giving you one more chance to retract that question. Put it back.”

“I’m probably going to regret this, but what’ve I got in my hand right now?”

“It’s the first milk a mother expresses during pregnancy and contains a greater amount of antibodies and proteins than typical breastmilk, which makes saving it important in case there are any concerns or complications during the baby’s first few days outside the uterus. And now that I’ve answered your question, and since it’s for my baby and not you, please put it back.”

“I see.” Instead of trying to protest that I had a stomach of steel from growing up with all Dad’s stories at the dinner table, I followed Perry’s request, shut the freezer door, and watched him dice the stems. There was only one place – okay, there were only two places the colostrum could’ve come from, and there was only one way it could’ve gotten from those places into the freezer, and it wouldn’t be where it was if he wasn’t saving it like he’d said. It was just one more thing to think about in the context of Perry having a baby.

I went to explore the rest of the house, bumped into Jordan, and kept moving so I didn’t hear anything besides her heading into the kitchen and asking Perry for his attention.

From what I could see, he’d done a good job of child-proofing the house. All the bottom-shelf cabinets had locks; there weren’t any low, sharp corners a crawling infant could knock into; the electric sockets were covered; the floor had been vacuumed and the rugs cleaned; there was a stack of sticky-noted books on the bedside table; the nursery looked like it’d been ready for months. It was all new wooden furniture, no scuffs or marks on anything, plenty of diapers, towels, toys, powders and oils, soft bedding in the crib and framed art on the walls, and a really nice, lush gliding chair Jordan found me in twenty minutes later. It was too comfortable to want to move from, even with what I’d heard from the kitchen.

“I would have _loved_ one of these when I was in chemo.” I laughed at the face she pulled. “I know, they wouldn’t be for everyone, but man, this is nice, just some good back-and-forth action. It’s very soothing.”

“I’m sure if I’d known these things existed I would have gotten you one. Listen, Perry and I –”

“You’re adults. I’m not going to get involved in this. I saw what you two did to each other during your divorce, and if you want to go through that all over again now that there’s a baby involved, I’m not going to say if it’s a good idea or not, but you can go ahead if you want to.” I sighed and pushed the chair back and forth again, letting it slide along the runners. “Or was it something else?” Jordan crossed her arms over her chest.

“I told him I told you.” She slumped down on the ottoman, and I barely had time to pull my feet away. “I never asked him if he wanted you to know or not, but I told him I’d told you.”

“So that’s what that shouting was about.”

“Mostly, yeah.”

“And what was the rest of it? Wait,” I held up a hand, “knowing what I know about what you and Perry have gone through, and are going through, I’m going to assume it was pizza toppings. It was pizza toppings, wasn’t it?” I could tell Jordan didn’t mean it when she smiled. I didn’t care: it was still a smile. “Okay, let’s go with that, then. How’d Perry take the news about me knowing it’s yours?”

“He didn’t like that he didn’t know you knew. But he took your knowing pretty well.”

“Who else knows? Who else knows I know you know I know, who else knows Perry knows you know I know? That I know you know I –”

“Knock it off, okay? Sheesh.” She rolled her eyes, but she sat up a little straighter and wasn’t slumped over quite so far. “The doctors that got him pregnant. They know.”

“Not Danni? Mom?”

“Not yet.”

“Because Perry hates them or because you don’t want them to know? Because if it’s about you,” I stood up to better gesticulate, “then you’ve _gotta_ tell Mom. For Danni and me. Mom would _finally_ be getting a grandkid. She wouldn’t even care it’s only because of some real-life lady mad scientists working to break nature in half or even that it’s coming out of Perry, it’d still be a grandkid, so _please_ , do it for me. Do it for Danni. Do it to get Mom to –”

“Ben.” Jordan looked up at me. Her mouth twitched to keep a smile in. “Just go and talk to him.”

Like Jordan had said, he’d taken it pretty well. He was at the stove, stirring a pot full of pasta and glancing between the digital timer counting down the minutes on the side of the fridge and the colander of diced greens. It almost made sense, in a really cockeyed way, that because he’d eaten like he was pregnant for years already that he was eating like a normal person now that he actually was – and I don’t care if Perry says they balance out, anchovies and pineapple never belong on the same pizza. I reached out to take a leaf but barely got within filching distance when he slapped my hand away.

“Hey!” I cradled it to my chest. “Fine, don’t share with me. I didn’t want any of your bitter greens anyway. Nnnhhhhnnn.”

“I know you didn’t. I know you just wanted to see if you could get away with it, and that’s why,” he dumped all the greens into the pot, “I’m only upset at you about Jordan telling you without clearing it with me, not with you trying to steal my dinner.” He began stirring them in, letting them wilt. “I’m not even all that upset. If there was anyone I’d have wanted to know about Jordan being the father, it’d be you. I would’ve rather you told me as soon as you knew that instead of letting Jordan do it, but I’m not going to waste energy right now on staying angry about it.”

“I’m sorry you were angry at all.”

“I should’ve known what I was getting into, voluntarily gestating one of your sister’s children.”

“Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that. Exactly what possessed you to think it’d be a good idea?”

“I knew her medical history.” He shrugged. “I knew she wouldn’t say no, and I knew I’d wanted to have a kid with her once upon a very long time ago.”

“So it made sense at the time. A lot of great stories start that way, you know.”

“At least two-thirds of all my patients come into the hospital with stories that start that way.”

“I’d bet that percentage is also true for tattoo parlors.”

“I’ll buy that for a dollar.” The timer dinged, and most of the fifty-fifty mix of _rapini_ and whole-wheat pasta went into tupperware containers and the rest went onto a plate. All the starchy, green broth went into another container, and Perry was generous enough to nuke a couple of frozen lasagnas for me and Jordan so his dinner guests wouldn’t even have to do that much to get their food onto the table.

It wasn’t made-to-order at a nice sit-down restaurant, but it was still a meal with people I wanted to spend time with. Jordan poured herself a glass of wine, Perry had prune juice, and I drank water. The company made it easy to get into the spirit of things without anything more exciting in my glass, and it kept going through dinner, out into the living room with Jordan drinking a scotch and Perry laughing as he told a story about a would-be daredevil patient of his from a couple of months ago. We hadn’t turned on the overhead lights, so all the brightness was coming from the lamps and how much fun we were having. I could see how different Perry’s skin had looked earlier when he’d been out in the sun just long enough to walk from the hospital to the car, and how Jordan was laughing with her whole body at the two of us, and I thought about how much I wanted her to keep on doing that. How much I wanted to remember it just right, just like it was happening.

“Hey.” They both looked at me, and I took their picture.

“Aw, Ben, I know you gotta –”

“No, no,” Jordan said, gulping down the rest of her Glen-fiddler-someone-or-other. “If you’re gonna take a picture of Perry now, you’ve gotta – do you remember that one, the magazine cover of the woman who married Bruce Willis?”

“Demi Moore,” I said. _Striptease, Indecent Proposal, About Last Night_ …

“Yeah, her. You remember that magazine cover she did? When she was all pregnant?”

“Oh, God, _yes!_ Perry, we are _so_ doing a _Vanity Fair!”_

“No, no, no we’re not, we’re –”

“Yes, yes, _yes, yes, yes_ we are! She was _so_ pregnant, you remember how pregnant she was but she wasn’t even as pregnant then as you are now, come _on_ , Perry!” I crowed. “It’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be one for the movies, it’s gonna be hilarious. Come on, I’ll give you a hand up. You got any duct tape?”

“Why the hell do you need duct tape?”

“For the backdrop!” I helped him to his feet. “Jordan, get some duct tape and a sheet, and I’ll get a couple lamps. The living room work? Your bedroom? Let’s do it in the bedroom. And I’m sure at some point that’s what my sister said, but –”

“No, Benji, it’s what _he_ said. Come on, Perry, c’mon, c’mon, this is the best thing that’s happened to me since you demanded your tits be off-limits until after the baby’s done weaning.” She grinned at me. “He’s so sensitive about saving all the milk he can. Everything’s gotta be for the baby, can’t afford to waste a drop on some really spectacular sex.”

“I don’t have tits,” he said as he crossed his arms over his chest.

“He whimpers when I bite them. They’re tits.”

“I do _not_ have tits.”

“Take your shirt off and I’ll be the judge of that,” I said. “Breasts, sure, by definition, teats I’ll grant you by the fact that you’ll be nursing, but tits, now _tits_ , they’re not like pornography, there’s requirements if you want to go around saying if someone’s got tits.”

“You want it off now? You want it off right now?” Perry grabbed the bottom of his jersey beneath his belly, tugging to make his point.

“In the bedroom, with the backdrop, _Clue: X-Rated_.”

“Wouldn’t be the worst sex-board game I’ve played,” Jordan smiled. “I’ll get the tape. I’ll be right there.”

Two drinks into the night and a third waiting on the bedside table, Jordan was still better coordinated than I was, so I just held the sheet in place over the closet while she taped it up. Perry sat on the bed while we got the lamps ready, plus the overhead light, and when it was finally enough, I took a bow like I imagined Cecil B. DeMille must have before getting everything under way. Jordan helped Perry up, and he stood in the lights of the crude set-up, fully clothed and undeniably pregnant.

“Happy now?”

I took a photo. “Strip! Strip! Strip for the monies, Perry!”

He grinned and pulled off his jersey. Jordan wolf-whistled as best she could, and Perry glanced over his shoulder at the camera as I took another shot. Then he turned around, and I had to stop and stare and really take in what I was looking at. It made me think of the time I accidentally saw Jordan’s friend Patricia Grassante topless – they’d been in Girl Scouts together, and I’d been the obnoxious little brother banished from the house for the afternoon who’d been poking around the side yard when Patricia was changing out of her swimsuit in the bathroom and didn’t see me past the blackberry hedge. I never told anyone, not her or Jordan or anyone, but I’d gotten a good look for the thirty seconds I stood there before I ran. Perry had a chest just like Patricia’s had been. Not enough for a bra, but enough that I knew there was something worth looking at.

And some really spectacular nipples. Those were worth staring at for thirty seconds and many more: mauve, with soft lavender streaks of lightning radiating out from them, they looked massive compared to the last time I’d seen Perry’s naked chest. Never mind his breasts or his belly; his nipples were where my attention was going.

“Nope, not tits.” I shook my head.

“I told you.” He slid a finger over his nose before he crossed his arms over his chest. Then he looked at me and grinned, cupping a breast in hand. “Hey, Ben, you wanna touch ’em?”

“Is that your attempt at seducing the camera or is it a real offer?”

“I already expressed this morning, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Okay, but considering the situation we’ve managed to get ourselves into…”

“Because if you say no, that basically means I’ve won Gay Chicken from now until forever.”

“Hey! As I was _saying_ , considering the situation we’ve managed to get ourselves into, and the fact that Gay Chicken wasn’t ever intended to apply to such things –”

“I’d say you fondling my breasts is about as gay as Gay Chicken can get.”

“Perry, I think we’ve gone way, way past where gender can apply.” He started rubbing his breast, making the nipple stand at attention. “So hell yeah, let me at you.”

“Come on over.”

And I did. His chest was just as soft as it’d looked. I tried to be gentle – I know how Perry doesn’t like being touched and didn’t want him to get uncomfortable, even if it’d been him offering – and didn’t make any sound effects, didn’t do anything I thought would make him feel bad about offering, did nothing but carefully stroke my fingertips over his breast.

“I’d have a way easier time getting off on someone groping your tits if it wasn’t my brother doing it.”

“I do not have tits!”

“He really doesn’t.” I dropped my hand away and smiled at Jordan. “But I can see why you like them so much.”

“Eugh.” She gulped down the rest of her drink. Perry was laughing, and I couldn’t stop giggling, not until the first time I saw him naked popped into my head. The first time we’d played Gay Chicken, out hiking in the mountains. We’d stripped naked to go swimming in a river, and we’d played before going in. I’d won, like I always won, but he’d blushed when he’d pulled away, and I’d never understood that. He was a little red in the cheeks right now, but that might’ve been because of how much he was laughing.

“Okay, now that’s all out of the way and both me and my sister can independently confirm you’ve got a very nice chest, by any other name ’twould be as soft,” Jordan almost hissed at me, “you can get those pants off and get posing.”

“By all means.”

They were scrub bottoms, not jeans or trousers, like he’d worn at Sacred Heart and to his doctor’s appointment, and it struck me they might be the best thing that fit him right now. I took a picture of him as he bent over, another as he stood up, and then one more when he began getting his underwear off. He glanced behind us, looking almost like he had when he’d pulled away that first time.

“It’s nothing either of us hasn’t seen before,” I said.

“Excuse me for wanting to keep my balance over here.” But off the undies came, and there he stood, and he didn’t even flinch when I took the shot. I’d seen his chest, I’d seen his belly, but I hadn’t seen it all put together. To be honest, it did look strange – Perry pregnant like a million bad mother-goddess illustrations was something that by all natural laws shouldn’t have been standing in front of me. But he was still standing there, and it wasn’t so much that Perry was pregnant so much _how_ he was pregnant, how _much_ he was pregnant. Because it wasn’t like women pregnant. There was the scar on his side, there was the shape and size of his hands on his stomach, there was the hair that was still somehow on his chest, there was his _dick_ – all in all, he was a very manly mother, and that was something that hadn’t even really existed until about a year ago.

“So what did she look like again, this Bruce Willis-married mother-to-be?”

“Like this.” Jordan got up and mimed it, arm over her breasts and hips cocked out. “Only since she was pregnant, she was sort of turned to the side, like if the photographer was right next to me, she was like this.”

“Hey, Ben, could you get a photo of my penis?”

“Sure, but why?” I dropped to a crouch and took a shot anyway.

“It’s just been ages since I’ve seen it without a mirror. I’d like some reminder it’s still there.” He jerked his head over at Jordan. “Besides her influence, at least.”

“I still don’t get why guys need to _see_ it.”

“If you’ve never seen your own genitals on a regular basis, you wouldn’t get it,” I told her.

“ _Thank_ you.” Perry rolled his shoulders out. “So she was like this?”

“No,” Jordan said, “more like this.”

“Now?”

“Got it.”

“Okay, now we’re cooking with oil here!” That got a smile, and I grabbed the moment by the throat and didn’t relax my grip as I took another picture, then two more, then took a break when I was laughing too hard, and then got another. I had to get a new roll of film, but that was fine; the back-and-forth helped everyone get easy with what we were doing – so easy, in fact, that Perry invited me over to touch his gigantic belly for a second time when the baby started moving again.

“I can’t believe I’m going to be an uncle. That’s pretty damn cool.” I turned the camera to catch both of us as best I could. “It really is.”


	19. If God moves across the water, then the girl moves in other ways

_How’s maternity leave treating you?_

_I’ve had more relaxing vacations. It’s nice to get in what sleep I can._

_I liked that part about mine._

_This is as peaceful as it’s going to be. He’s just…here. This is it. I don’t think I’ll miss it, but…_

_I missed parts of it. There’s nothing wrong with that._

_I’m going to miss him being with me._

*

Back in the second trimester, right about when he’d started working with his lactation consultant – who was still extremely proud of his progress, more than most of her other patients – Cox had scoped out all the possible maternity rooms he’d want to spend time in while recovering from his son’s birth. It wasn’t the official policy to make reservations, but it was the general suggestion to honor requests if possible. So unless an undergrad went into labor somewhere on campus in the next two days and all the other possible rooms were full and they couldn’t put them anywhere else, Cox would have his corner room. He liked the way the afternoon sunlight spread out over the trees from the third-floor window and how it was far enough away from the elevators and stairs and the floor’s main hallways that he’d be able to get a little bit of quiet.

Tomorrow night, he’d sleep there pregnant, and the night after that, he’d sleep there a mother.

He wouldn’t sleep there _alone_. Cox knew he hadn’t slept alone for close to exactly thirty-eight weeks.

Trust mad scientists to keep accurate timetables.

At present, the most strenuous things he’d done during his first week of maternity leave was wash, sort, fold, bag, and put away two more loads of baby clothes, vacuum the living room one final time, cook and freeze some more future dinners, and field calls from people at the hospital. If it was either an obligatory legal question or Carla, he’d give an answer; if it was anyone else, like Newbie, he just hung up.

After an evening shower and a now-routine round of expressing and producing enough that he knew his son would eat really well his first couple of weeks whether or not he took to a nipple, Cox was more than ready to get into bed and just fall asleep. Except Jordan was already there, flipping through one of the books he kept around for the rare nights he was up to reading.

“I’m not sure if it’s ironic or appropriate you’re reading Emily Post,” she said, not looking up from the page. “Then again, as late as it is for her to do anything for you, that little monster you’ve got in there – sorry,” she held up a hand as he growled without feeling it, “that little proto-human you’re still gestating, they’ve got _some_ hope left.”

“Given the models they’d have to work from if you were their mother, I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to be concerned about.”

“Off the top of my head, the inevitable ‘where did I come from’ conversation.”

“Easy: they came from their mother.”

“Their mother being their dad.”

“This wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.” 

Jordan set the book aside and looked at him, and Cox knew exactly what she was looking at. He knew the novelty of fucking a pregnant man still hadn’t worn off, and nothing else kept her coming back. It wasn’t something to talk about, not unless he wanted to frighten it away by proposing Jordan had the capacity to form emotional relationships. Which she didn’t; he knew that from experience. She wasn’t looking at him as someone who was carrying their child – both of theirs; half its genes and chromosomes came from her – or as someone worth much of anything to her or anyone else. What she saw when she looked at him was a good lay.

But she was still the person who’d helped make his son.

He sat down on his side of the bed with the usual production and dying bear noises. Jordan waited until he was at least seated before asking, “So you go in tomorrow morning?”

“I don’t have to be there until tomorrow night, but, you know. Might as well head on in there.”

“And that’s going to be it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean – never mind. It’ll be the birth day, the day of the birth. It was a stupid question.”

He turned around to look at her, ready to tell her how her level of investment in his pregnancy meant she didn’t have to feel bad for not caring about his son, except the way she was looking at him made him shut his mouth. She was looking at him like she hadn’t since before they’d been married – since before they’d been engaged, honestly. Like she cared about him and what was going to happen to him.

She reached out and placed her hand on his cheek, pulling him in for a kiss.

So Cox kissed her back. Jordan always kissed well, no matter how she felt about him at the time of the kissing; it was something she took pride in, like bending people to her will for her own selfish purposes or baking a surprisingly good plum cake. Right now, he was more than glad to help her feel good about herself. She pushed herself over on the bed, not quite straddling him and his baby, but leaning over him at an angle that wouldn’t leave him with a crick in his neck. He slid a hand up her arm, down her front, up and under her pajama top to cup her breasts and roll her nipple with his thumb.

“No fair,” she murmured, stroking his breasts with her fingertips, just enough to tease him and make him squirm. Then she gently – _very_ gently – pulled back to rear up on her knees and pull off her top, and give him the full effect of her tight, soft body, shaped exactly like nature and talented surgeons intended. Cox couldn’t imagine what she saw when she looked at him and stopped trying to figure it out when she flipped over and kicked off her pajama bottoms, then helped him out of the scrubs he’d been using for pajamas the last few months. She nodded at the sight, face set hard, and Cox didn’t wait for her to make the next move, just reached up and pulled her down, almost slamming their mouths together and not even feeling bad about it. This was something he could do right now, this was all he _wanted_ to do right now, use his tongue wherever on her body she let him go, and tonight of all nights that would be more than plenty for him – he could already smell her, gorgeous and wet and _rich_ , and he couldn’t wait to taste her. It was even plenty enough just to kiss her on the lips and feel her slide her tongue over his, and the memory of the last time she’d lain herself down over his face pushed a moan out from deep inside his chest, from somewhere around where his son’s heart was beating.

Jordan kissed him right back, deep and tender, like nothing they’d done in the last three years had ever happened. She ran a hand down his ribcage without quite touching his belly.

“How’s it going in there?” she whispered, stroking his hip.

“It’s all quiet on the Western Front,” he said and kissed her again.

“Good,” she said, sliding her hand from his hip to his penis, and Cox did _not_ whimper into her mouth as she took him in hand and began jerking him off.

“Jordan, I –”

“Now this is impressive. Do we have to tell your doctors you can still get it up?”

“I’m pretty sure yes – ahh, Jordan–”

“Either tell me to stop or shut up.”

“ _Ahhhh_ –”

He knew she’d be out the door if he asked. So he moaned, and she stayed. Jordan hadn’t taken off her cross, and it caught the light and almost flickered as she reared up on her knees – and Cox wouldn’t admit to groaning at the loss of contact or at the sight of her _or_ how he still wasn’t feeling his hard-on as much of anything – and pivoted around to straddle him in the reverse-cowgirl position, not even bothering with the usual pillows, and slid down his cock.

Cox would _not_ admit to being the source of the sounds coming out of his mouth when she started fucking him. They must have come from someone else. What he did was fist the blankets and try not to think about how much his neck hurt or how tired he was getting or the way Jordan was doing that _thing_ with her hips that always got him off fast except it wasn’t working tonight, and when it didn’t, she’d pull off and give him a handjob except tonight she doubled down on fucking him – harder, faster, _squeezing_ him, more and more, and it still wasn’t almost enough. She started moving gently, and he didn’t look up because he couldn’t see anything over his belly to begin with, but he felt it when she started masturbating, knew it from the little hisses she always made when she got herself off. He wasn’t even here for all that was happening, and somehow _that_ idea out of everything got him to plant his heels on the mattress to gain some leverage and start fucking her as best he could with what he had left. _I’m not just your fuckstick, Jordan – come on, c’mon,_ “Come on –”

“Perry, just –”

Whatever Jordan wanted him to do didn’t matter because he was grinding his head into the pillows and arching his back as much as he could while thirty-eight weeks pregnant as he finally came. Slow and weak and stuttering, it was more a technicality than an orgasm. It was still a climax, and he let it flutter through him as Jordan finished getting herself off. She rolled away and he lay there, panting hard.

He was still lying there when she finished getting her pajamas back on and was climbing under the covers.

“Are you just going to lie there all night?”

Cox answered by rolling over and facing away from her.

“Couldn’t you at least shower?”

“I’ll take one tomorrow morning.” He closed his eyes and pulled his hands up underneath the pillows, too tired to move and almost too overtired to sleep. Not quite, but close.

Cox woke up to the luxuriously torturous smell of coffee and managed to get through a shower and into some clean clothes before dragging himself to the kitchen. Jordan was sitting there, smirking into her steaming mug of perfect coffee. It was almost too much for him to take, and he groaned and buried his face in his hands.

When Ben came over, all Cox needed him to do was to grab the duffel bag and drive him to the campus hospital, and Ben was happy to do both.

Why Jordan decided to come along, Cox had no idea, but here she was in the room with him, after Ben had excused himself and before the Study’s nurses arrived to begin the barrage of necessary tests and procedures before he gave birth. He sat on the bed, and she stood by the window, arms crossed over her chest and staring out at the eucalyptus trees. It was a classically Californian view. Growing up, he’d seen pictures of eucalyptus trees, but hadn’t seen one for himself until he’d moved to California. He’d seen palm trees and cactus in the big Frick park greenhouse, but he’d never seen eucalyptus in anything but photos until he’d come here and seen them in person. His son was going to grow up with eucalyptus trees. He’d grow up with rolling foothills covered with tall wild grass and summers that never saw so much as a single drop of rain, he’d grow up with scrub jays and yellow-billed magpies and people that used the word _vibes_ with genuine sincerity.

Tomorrow, his son would be born in California. Today was the end of them – just him and his son together. The intimacy of being his mother would never disappear, but the state of being his son’s entire world was almost done.

Cox leaned back on one hand and carefully, gently, slid the other up underneath the scrub top to rest on his stomach, just above where his son was sleeping. He closed his eyes, felt, and smiled.

“Hey,” Jordan said, and he straightened up and snatched his hand away as she turned to look at him. “Ready to get it all over with?”

“Completely. Everything everyone’s said about this whole enterprise giving men a greater respect for women is completely true. There’s _no way_ I could make it through a pregnancy just waiting for labor to happen. It’s a huge relief to know exactly what time tomorrow I’m giving birth.”

“You know it’s going to take you about another nine months to lose all the pregnancy weight, right?”

“As I’ve been made well aware, yes. But I was just thinking…” he sighed. “You can mock me for this all you want, but I’m pregnant, so just let me say this, all right? And I know it’s silly, and not medically accurate at all, but I keep thinking how I know what’s happening, and what’s going to happen, and I can’t help but think that he doesn’t know, and I almost –”

“He?”

“Yeah, he’s going to be born tomorrow and he doesn’t know that, and…dammit _._ ” She looked at him like he’d just confessed to shooting her dog and insisting she be the one to dig its grave. “Jordan, I’m sorry, I know you didn’t want to know, but I swear to you I didn’t mean –”

“You know what, Perry? At this point, it’s fine.”

“Really?”

“Sure.” She shrugged, going back to looking out the window and not looking at Cox at all. “I didn’t want to know it was a boy until it was born, but hey, what’s another twenty hours?”


	20. Oh my fair North Star, I have held to you dearly

_Is it okay if I invite you to the birth?_

_Yes and no. If you want me to be there as your friend, I’m not your friend and I can’t do that. But, and if you’ll let me finish – but if I’m there as one of your doctors, then yes._

_Really?_

_I know how much it means to you. If that’s how I’m invited, then that’s how I can come._

*

Perry had told me and Jordan to get there early and to sneak him some scotch; we’d followed half his instructions and arrived almost two hours ahead of time, but they wouldn’t let us see him. Not even Jordan. Something about Perry needing the time alone with his doctors to make sure he was prepared for the surgery. We were on the list of visitors Perry had authorized to attend the birth itself, in the operating room and everything, and that was good news for me and no news for Jordan.

I wasn’t the only person to get handed a camera after scrubbing in. The woman who got one – I was pretty sure I knew who she was, and that I’d seen her work, but I introduced myself first just to make sure. And sure enough, I was standing right next to and chatting with the official photographer of the Matthias Study, the one and only Dawn Benayoun, who was almost as tall as I was and talked like a perfect Ohio farmer’s daughter.

She’d been a surgical photographer for twelve years and got this job by being invited.

“And yourself? I’m just curious. I mean, I’d guess you already know the mother, but I wouldn’t want to presume in what capacity.”

“Oh, I’m his ex-brother-in-law.”

She nodded and smiled. “You know that’s not as strange as this gets, but it’s still getting up there.”

“That’s very flattering of you to say.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ben.”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Dawn.” We got our cameras back and hung around at the edge of the room while the medical staff got everything ready and arranged. “Is it usually stressful at these things?”

“I thought it might be, but then at Susan’s – sorry, the first. You know, that’s the only one I think of by the baby’s name. Anyway, at the first, when everything started, it was just like any other job I’ve had. Focus on getting the best shot and making the most of what I can see.”

“I’m mostly here because Perry wanted –”

“Perry? Oh, right, the mother. Sorry. You were saying?”

“Just that he wanted something that wasn’t that clinical, and he knows this is a big hobby of mine. I would’ve wanted to be here for this anyway, so I’m happy he thought I’d do a good job in here.” I smiled behind my mask. “I guess I can think of this thing we did last week as practice.” 

“What thing? Tell me about it.”

“Do you remember that one Demi Moore cover of _Vanity Fair?_ ”

She did, and as she almost fell over laughing while I mimed Perry’s poses, they started seating people in the observation booth. Jordan got her front-row seat next to an older woman and a couple more about her own age and rolled her eyes when I waved at her while covered head to toe in bright hospital green.

When they wheeled Perry in on a gurney, he was wearing a cap and gown and glancing around like he’d never seen an OR before. He caught my eyes and smiled, and reached out a hand from across the room. I walked over and took it and squeezed gently, his bare hand in my gloved one. 

“Hey, Ben. Glad you could make it.” Like we were meeting up for beer and pool, like it was an ordinary day. 

“Thanks for inviting me.” He looked tired, but good. It helped when he smiled. I wouldn’t be able to see if anyone else in the room smiled; everyone but him was wearing a mask.

“Perry?” One of the surgeons touched his shoulder. “We’re ready to get started.”

“Thank you.” He turned back to me. “Sorry. This might take a few minutes.”

I held up my camera. “I’ve got something to keep myself occupied.”

“Good boy,” a nurse said. “But if you could step back, that’d be helpful.”

Then the nurses helped Perry sit up, and with their help, so many of them reaching out and supporting him, he sat on the table and lay down, almost like he was going to bed with the pillows and blankets they arranged underneath him. They were asking him how he was and if he needed anything, and the surgeons were talking to each other, and I was standing aside, nobody talking to me, just me behind my camera like I liked things. There was a lot going on: Perry getting needles in his arms and the back of his hands with bags of fluid hung up and attached, Perry rolling onto his left side and pulling his legs up as best he could to get the biggest needle I’d ever seen injected into his spine for an epidural, Perry shivering in the cold air and clenching his eyes shut until the procedure was done and the nurses helped him get back to the proper Cesarean position. They pulled up his gown and draped it onto a stand to make a little curtain so his belly was exposed to the air and the lights.

Last week I’d seen him without clothes on underneath bright lights, but then he’d been nude, and they’d only been house lamps. Even with the gown on, he looked _naked_ , hugely pregnant and stripped bare, and the other word I needed was _lambent_ , the way his skin and veins took the harsh overhead lights and almost made them pretty, the way the veins and scar on his chest made it look like rivers on an old medieval map of the world.

Then the nurses strapped his legs down. That was the thing which made me realize this was going to be a surgery, that right there. Perry was strapped down underneath the harsh operating room lights, and I was only just now realizing he was going to be operated on. To make sure that he wouldn’t be pregnant anymore. There was a doctor talking to him, two surgeons busy with their knives, nurses all over, Dawn with her own camera, me hanging back, and Perry lying underneath the harsh lights, closing his eyes to take a deep breath as he lay still and everything spun around him.

Old medieval maps had the world as the center of the universe before we knew it wasn’t.

“Hey, there it is!” He laughed, pointing up at the mirror they’d set up above the table. “There’s my penis!” Everyone laughed at that, even me. He’d already had his chest and belly shaved, which seemed like a good thing to get out of the way ahead of time for something like this, and a catheter was already snaking out of his dick.

One nurse next to me shook her head. “Penises always look kind of silly, don’t they?”

“ _So_ glad I don’t have to deal with one anymore,” one of the doctors said.

I was about to say I’d never really thought about it much, but they went back to Perry, drawing up a curtain over his chest and making sure the mirror was in the right place. I felt strange, and I was pretty sure that it was just me and not the fact that my very pregnant male best friend was about to have a baby.

Then I took another look around, and it hit me: Perry and I were the only men in the room.

“Is Hanrahan here?” he asked the nurse by his side, arranging his arm on the table.

“She’s on her way.”

“I thought she was –” He took a deep breath. “No. She’ll be here. She’ll be here, won’t she?”

“She told me she’s on her way.”

“Who’s Hanrahan?” I asked him.

“One of my doctors.”

“If it makes you feel any better, Jordan’s already here.” I waved to her, but she just huffed and looked away.

“Jordan? What –” He tried to lift his head, but moaned right away, and a nurse pressed her hand down on his forehead. “Oh, _Jesus_.”

“Keep your head down, Perry,” she murmured.

“God, when is it going to fucking _start?_ ”

“Soon,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Just a few more minutes,” another nurse said. “You might wanna get into position.”

“Assume the position,” I intoned and patted his shoulder, which made him smile. 

“I know I said it already, but I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too.”

“You feeling all right?” One of the surgeons asked Perry.

“I think so.”

“You can relax. We’ve done this six times.” 

Dawn and I had talked a bit about who’d cover what. She was the one who shot the photos for all the newspapers and journals, and she was in charge of recording the birth itself for the Study’s medical records and private archive. I could take whatever I wanted, and I’d already decided to focus on Perry. When things got underway, there wasn’t much else I could think to focus on. I knew that C-sections went fast, and that the surgeons were going to cut into Perry’s torso and pull the kid out through the incision site. And I knew Perry knew more about what going on than that, but they’d pulled up the curtain and shifted the mirror, and he couldn’t see what was happening. He was asking what people were doing and the surgeons and nurses were telling him _no tableside doctoring_ , and they were leaving me out of it, ignoring me so I could move around the edge of the room and take pictures of the surgeons when they were getting into place.

And then things started moving. They just got onto their feet and _ran_ for it. The incision, the first incision – I didn’t watch them cutting into my friend but I heard them narrating what they were doing for anyone in the room who’d listen. _Are you in any pain? I can feel something but it doesn’t hurt. Let me know if it does._ _It doesn’t hurt. That’s good._ _I can feel it but it doesn’t hurt_. I looked up at the mirror and down at Perry, and he wasn’t looking at anything. I peeked over the curtain and saw a flash of his guts on display and wished I hadn’t. 

I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. Just the sounds and the fragments of sounds, things I almost knew. I was standing at the edge of a party where I could hear everything and couldn’t hear a thing at all. Nobody was talking to me, and I was taking shot after shot, everyone’s eyes focused and strong. Perry was shivering, and the nurse put her hand on his forehead again, and he looked like he was going to cry.

 _Primary is it I can’t it’s okay it’s all okay I need to see let me see get the mirror down so we can see so I can see._ I stood there invisible. _Incision nurse make sure I can see are you ready how are don’t what need suction is he is he is the mirror yes I can see are you watching_. I wasn’t watching the surgeons, I wasn’t watching the birth, I was watching Perry. I saw him gasp at something he saw in the mirror, and I looked, and –

And there – 

And there was a baby.

“Congratulations,” the surgeon said, “you have a son.”

“Oh my god.” Perry was crying, his voice was cracking, and his face was shining in sweat and tears and joy. “Oh my god, he’s here.”

“He sure is,” she said.

“Can I – I have to, where is –”

“Just a moment, just wait a moment. It’s all right. Here he is.”

“Let me – oh my god, let me –” The nurse pulled the bulb away from the baby’s mouth and that was the moment Perry’s son started howling. He wasn’t even cleaned off yet, all wet and hairy, covered with bits of blood and white stuff like cottage cheese, and Perry didn’t even care, just took his son in his arms, held him close and kissed him. Both of them were crying, Perry almost sobbing and his son just wailing. “Oh my god.”

“Beginning hysterectomy,” someone said. I looked over to see what they were doing just long enough to glimpse something red and pink and wrenched myself back to Perry, whose son was quieting down in his arms, whimpering as softly as Perry was.

“Oh my god. Ben. Ben,” he whispered. “Ben.”

“I’m here.”

“Ben.” He looked up at me. “I’m a mother.”

“You sure are, Perry.”

“Ah, Perry, we need him? Now, please. It’s okay, we’ll give him back right away.”

“I know, I know. Here, just be fast, right away?”

“It’ll just be a moment,” the nurse said. I watched them take him, and I knew if it felt long for me, I couldn’t imagine what it was like for Perry. But when he got his son back, he started crying all over again. It was just clean-up after that: cleaning Perry, cleaning his son, cleaning out the room to clean up the room, and I didn’t really mind since I didn’t exactly want to stick around and watch them stitch my friend back together. Dawn and I were the last ones out of there, and when she got her mask off and began washing her hands to get the latex not-smell off them, she said, “I’d say that went well.”

“He’s got a baby now, so yeah, I’d agree with you.”

“They always cry, you know.”

“Who?” 

“The mothers. They always cry.”

After Dawn had recovered from the _Vanity Fair_ story, she’d offered to use her darkroom for my photos so nobody would be in danger of breaking non-disclosure agreements. I could get why that was a concern, since there was a lot of stuff going on that had to be kept secret for all sorts of good reasons like personal privacy and medical confidentiality and not getting attacked by crazed people who thought the punishment for breaking the laws of nature was supposed to be a capital one. At the same time, I couldn’t really understand any of that. It was just a baby. A baby sleeping in his mother’s arms, even. There wasn’t a lot more wholesome than that.

Maybe Superman.

Perry barely glanced up from his son when I came into the room and didn’t even say hello to me. His son looked less like a creature from a horror movie and more like a baby, now that he was cleaned off and wrapped up, and I knew it was just a matter of time before he started that ambulance-grade crying again. But for now, he was demonstrating why the phrase ‘sleeping like a baby’ had its roots in reality.

Jordan was already standing next to the bed, and she jerked her head at Perry and rolled her eyes, trying to tell me he’d been like this for a while – probably since the moment he’d been allowed visitors and she’d been the first one let inside. I shrugged to tell her I was cool with it. The nurse in the room smiled at both of us, finished checking the monitors attached to Perry, and left the room.

“Hey,” I said. “Congratulations. To both of you.”

“Thank you,” Perry whispered.

“So what’s his name?”

“Jack.”

“That’s a distinctly ordinary name.”

“Which is kind of the point.”

“It wasn’t _my_ first choice,” Jordan muttered.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“But isn’t he supposed to be named after someone?” she asked. “Isn’t that how it works?”

“My grandfather’s name was Jacob, and the J itself, which I thought you’d find flattering –”

“Hey. Over here.” When they looked, I grabbed their picture. “And now we have the first family photo.”

“I want the negatives,” Jordan said.

“And you’ll get them as soon as you ask nicely.”

Perry didn’t quite laugh; he sort of wheezed a low giggle instead. It sounded weird coming out of him, but according to the waiting room pamphlet on C-sections I’d read last week, he wouldn’t be able to do much of anything strenuous with his torso until it healed from the surgery after a few weeks. No laughing, no sneezing, no heavy lifting, no crying.

“Can I hold him?”

“Soon,” he murmured, not looking at me.

“He won’t even let _me_ hold him.” She crossed her arms. “He’s let the nurses hold the baby more than me.”

“They’re all trained professionals and always give him back the instant I ask. You, I can’t be certain about.” Perry sighed and shuffled back up against the pillows. “He’s still settling into living outside of a uterus. You can hold him soon.”

“When do you get to go home?”

“Ten days. They want to make sure everything’s okay with us.” I nodded at how easily he referred to himself and Jack as _us_. “It’s nothing to be worried about, just more of the usual stuff newborns and mothers always get.”

“He’s got to save the first bowel movement,” Jordan said. “Why, I don’t –”

“Determining chemical and oxygen composition of amniotic fluid within an artificially grown uterus as differentiated from a naturally occurring one is why,” Perry said. “And seeing what and how it changes inside a digestive system. That sort of thing.”

“They’re really looking for everything,” I nodded.

“As much as they can find.”

“So – oh, right. Unless Jordan drank it already, we’ve still got the scotch you –”

“Hang on.” Jack had woken up and was moving around, starting to make noises, and it hadn’t really registered with me that Perry was wearing a sort of backwards-facing open-in-front hospital gown, but there was good reason for that. All he needed to do was pull one side open to get Jack attached to a nipple. Traveling around the world, I’d seen more breastfeeding than I had all the time I’d lived in the States, and I’d liked thinking I’d be okay with Perry doing it. It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought he would, not with whatever it was he had in his freezer that he’d had me and Jordan drop off yesterday. I knew I was fine with what he was doing; I just needed a second to grasp what I was seeing.

“So, um, I was –”

“Shh,” he whisper-hissed, and I did my best to stay quiet.

Taking a picture helped.

Jack didn’t take long to finish, and when he was done, he went right back to sleep. Perry wiped his son’s face clean before moving to his nipple and fumbled one-handed at the gown for a moment before leaving it lying open.

“Sorry. You were saying?”

“Can I hold him now?”

“Ah, well…”

“Shouldn’t I get a chance to hold him today? Unless you think Jack’s father needs –”

“Why is it that you think I give a crap whether or not I hold a baby?”

“Jordan, please.”

“What, it’s bad I’m swearing in front of someone less than twelve hours old?”

“No, it’s the fact that he’s _your_ baby too, not just Perry’s. I’d think you’d want a turn to hold your son.”

“Because he’s my son, I know I’ll get a chance to hold him eventually. Am I right, Perry?”

“Eventually.” 

“Which works for me. Maybe I’ll want to hold him at some point today, but right now, he’s all yours if you want. I’m going to get some lunch. Maybe I’ll want to hold him after that.”

“You know where to find him!” I called out as she left. “So can I? Is now a good time?” Perry finally looked up at me. “If it’s not, you can just say, you know. I don’t mind.”

“It’s not that. It’s…just be careful, okay?”

“I’ve held babies before, Perry.” I still remembered holding Danni when she was a baby and I would’ve been about six, and I remember looking down on her when I managed to get her in my arms, how Mom said I was a good big brother because of how calm she was being. Since then, I’ve held plenty of little kids and a good number of babies. But I realized, after Jack was in my arms, I’d never held a newborn before. Never someone so much, as the term breaks down into, newly born. Jack was the smallest person I’d ever held, and that right there was the big realization for me. I’d seen him born just a few hours ago, I’d been in the room to watch and hear and smell it happen, and now that he was in my arms, I could really –

“Okay, now give him back.”

“What?”

“That’s enough. You can give him back now.” Perry held out his arms, gestured for his baby to be brought over to them, and even though I liked how light and warm Jack was in mine, I gave him back to his mother.

“Thank you for that generous display of affection and trust,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready to hand him over for another twelve seconds of holding, just let me know.”

He did that sort of wheezing laugh again. “No problem.”

“Thank you, though.”

“You know Jordan wants you as godfather?” He spoke like he hadn’t heard me.

“Really? She didn’t tell me about that.”

“She just told me today, a little before you got here. And I don’t. Want you as godfather, that is. It’s not you, Ben. I just don’t see the point.”

“What’s Jordan got to say about that?” I took another picture of Jack in Perry’s arms.

“She says it’s important to have a sense of faith.”

“And you told her you didn’t care?"

“I did.”

“And she tried to pull the whole ‘if you don’t care why should you care about this’ card?”

“And I told her that as his mother, I can make these decisions for Jack, and if I _did_ want a godfather, I’d want it to be you. If I wanted Jack to have a godfather.”

“Did she ask if Paige could be godmother?”

“Paige knows I don’t care.”

“Does she know she’s an aunt?”

“She will.”

“Seriously? You haven’t told her yet?” He shook his head. “Is she at least going to come out and visit?”

“I’ll tell her soon.”

“Soon this month or soon today?”

“Soon as in soon. Is that good enough for you?”

“That’s perfectly fine,” I said. And that was that because Jack wanted to eat again, and the nurses came back to see if they had a bowel movement to collect, and I was getting kind of hungry myself.

Jordan wasn’t in the cafeteria, but the car was still in the parking lot, so I figured she’d just gone to the campus duck pond or maybe the redwood grove. Someplace besides the hospital so she could feel like she could leave if she wanted. It would’ve sounded cruel if it was anyone else, but that was just how Jordan was. All I had to do was to wait for her to come back.

The old woman from the observation room was sitting on one of the big concrete slabs out in front that weren’t quite as pale as the building itself. “Hey there.” She looked at me and I waved, “Is it okay if I join you out here?”

“Oh, by all means.”

“Thanks.” The concrete was cold through my jeans, enough that I shivered when I sat down. “That was really something today. To put it as blandly as possible.”

“It really was. I’ve seen all the births, and they’re all special. Every one of them.”

“You’ve seen all the births in the Matthias Study?” She nodded. “Do you – sorry. It’s that I only got to see it because I know the mother, and I’m pretty sure Perry would’ve mentioned you if you were coming.”

“We’ve spoken before, but I wouldn’t say we really know each other. I’ll be seeing him later, when he’s gotten some rest.”

“How’d you get such a good seat?”

“I’ve been working in the Study for a while now.”

“Rank hath its privileges?”

“There’s no debating with seniority,” she said.

“I guess not. Oh, right. I’m Ben,” I held out my hand, and she took it with a lot of strength in her paper-soft hands.

“Diane. It’s nice to meet you, Ben.”

“You too.” There wasn’t a lot happening in the parking lot, but just past it, past all the security, I could see the the people going by on campus. All of them with their own lives, so many students exactly the age they always were, and me the college town kid, growing up and changing while everything on campus stayed exactly as it’d always been. Their lives hadn’t changed at all today – not in the way that mine had, definitely not in the way Perry’s had. I had no idea how their lives had changed today. Looking out at them and thinking about holding Jack didn’t feel like getting out of a chemo session and heading down to a park to be outside in the sun for a while and watch everyone that had lives which I could tell myself didn’t include cancer in any meaningful way. But it was close.

I pulled a flask out of my jacket, unscrewed the cap and held it out. “Would you like some?” Diane blinked at me behind her glasses. “Johnny Walker. Blue label. I brought it for Perry, the mother, for after the birth, but I think he’s abstaining until the baby’s done breastfeeding, so it’s up to us to drink it.”

“I’m not one to turn down a birthday’s drink.” She took a big sip, handed the flask back, and I took just a taste – I’m a rum-and-beer kind of guy, and Perry’s scotch always burned going down if I didn’t drink it carefully. But it was a clean burn, I’d give it that. “With my children, they let me have a drink in the hospital when each of them was born. My husband, God rest his soul, would bring in a bottle of wine and make a show of uncorking it right there in the maternity ward. All the doctors had a drink with us, the nurses too. No, I know what you’re thinking, it wasn’t better back then just because my husband brought me wine after I gave birth. But it was nice getting a drink when I knew I’d deserved one.” Diane sighed. “I’ve suggested we always offer the mothers a drink, but that didn’t get far.”

“In that case, I’m glad I was able to get you something of your wishes.”

“And thank you for that, even if you had no idea.”

“Did you have to use those little plastic cups?”

“No, it was always out of a glass. By the time I had my daughter, everyone knew what was coming and had some wineglasses ready for us.”

“That sounds pretty festive.”

“Like I said, it was a different time.”

“Yeah, back then women were the only ones that had babies.”

“It might be that way again soon.” I handed the flask to her and she drank the way old women do, with a stamina no young man could ever match. So I didn’t bother trying when she handed it back. “There’s no saying if this specific type of motherhood is going to continue past the end of the Study. I always thought fifty was a good number to get this off the ground, but whether or not it keeps going after that last baby – I can’t say. Nobody can say.”

“I’d think that – wait. Okay, hang on. Ben _Sullivan_ , that’s my name, what’s your name, Diane?”

“Diane Matthias,” she said.

“Diane –” I leaned back to get a better look at her while she sat there and looked back at me, smiling very gently. She had short hair, glasses, a sensible suit for a festive occasion, and didn’t look anything like what I’d pictured when the name came up. I took a big drink, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and managed to get my breath back. “So these babies, are they sort of like – do you think of them as your grandkids, or is that so off-base that I should apologize for even thinking it?”

“No, no,” she laughed, “but that’s more correct than what some people have said about them. I do, somewhat. I have what people would say are _honest_ grandchildren, my sons’ and daughter’s own children. But what I feel when I see the mothers and their babies is very similar.” 

“So you became a grandmother for what, the sixteenth time today?”

“Fourteenth.” 

“You’re telling me you’ve got fourteen assorted grandkids from one child or a mother.” Diane nodded. “And if Jack was number seven, then – you’re going to have fifty-seven in all. Good thing you’ve got everyone at the Study to keep the Christmas card lists in order.”

“It’s kind of you to think that Christmas cards are my biggest concern.”

“Why so many? I mean – it’s that I’ve been following this since I found out Perry was a part of it, and maybe I read it somewhere and forgot. But why have the Study with so many mothers?”

“With fifty?” She looked at me up and down, shaking her head and almost laughing, then sighed and went on. “When this was still something that only existed on paper and draft proposals, I knew that if there was only one child, only one mother, then my work would go down with Mengele. I knew if there were ten mothers, then at best it’d go down with Tuskegee. But fifty births goes well past proof of concept out into reality. There’s substance to it.”

“You think with fifty you can go down with Salk or something?”

“I think with fifty, we’ll go down as ourselves. It’s not just about the babies, you know.”

“I guess I knew you wanted to study pregnancy, but I didn’t think that much about it.”

“Being able to study pregnancy with a control group is a wonderful thing, and I’m glad we’re doing that. It’s how I sold a lot of the early research proposals. But having had three children, I can tell you pregnancy is seen as a fine thing while it’s happening but being a mother is never given respect. It’s only the gestation and the birth, not what comes after – and that’s only if they’re lucky. And I knew that if men looked and saw themselves as mothers, even as _potential_ mothers, then mothers in the future wouldn’t have to suffer through what used to happen when someone had a child. Don’t get me wrong, Ben, I’m happy I had my children and I’m happy they’re here, but everyone else seemed to think that once they were born, I’d get right back to being myself again.”

“You broke nature in half for better maternity leave policy.”

“We’ll put it back together when we’re done.” Something gentle pulled the corners of her face. “I like to think there will be more children born to men after these fifty. I know it’s possible the last birth will mark the end of this great experiment, and my work will just be something people read about in textbooks and research journals, something someone did once upon a time. But even if that happens, I’ll know I’ll still have done my part to change the world.”

Diane looked up at the sky, that California blue that doesn’t happen anywhere else on the planet. It’s something I missed more than good hot dogs and the big, wide highways, but I looked at Diane instead. It was barely noon but it’d been a long day for me, a longer one for her, and it’d been the longest for Perry and Jack. Diane had a beautiful softness to her face that old women get more than old men, all over the world. So I did what I do best, and I hid behind my camera and took her picture.


	21. And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first

_It’s a lovely view._

_The crows all roost out on the far side of the parking lot, out in the eucalyptus trees._

_Yeah, I can see them from here._

_They fly out all over the place in the morning, and they come back each night. I have no idea where they go or what they do all day._

_I think there’s some people in the animal science department working on that._

_Would you like to hold him?_

_I’m sorry?_

_Jack. You can…you can hold him if you like._

_You mean that?_

_I do._

_Then, yes. I’d love to hold him._

_Okay._

_I won’t drop him._

_Here – careful, careful._

_Hello. Hey, baby, baby, hello. And good-bye, baby Jack. Here you go, back to your mother._

_Here we are…_

_Thank you._

_Oh?_

_Thank you for letting me hold your son._

*

It was the Matthias Study’s policy to forgo the maternity ward entirely and room-in the mothers and children in all cases, but Cox knew even if it wasn’t the Study’s policy he still would’ve insisted on it just the same. Knowing that he and Jack wouldn’t spend any large amount of time away from each other made everything easier to bear and their brief separations just one more thing to get through instead of a source of worry and anxiety.

Though Jack usually slept through those separations, or he had nurses bathing him, or he’d just fed, and he was still in the life stage of immediate physical comfort being more than enough to keep him relaxed and happy. He was also young enough that any physical pain was a completely transient sensation, and within the hour it was as if nothing had happened, something all the doctors and nurses could confirm.

But no matter how many times Cox explained that to Jordan, she didn’t believe it.

“Four-day-old children categorically _cannot_ give meaningful medical consent. This is why their parents are responsible for these sorts of decisions, _not the children_ ,” Cox pressed.

“Vaccinating isn’t the same as mangling a perfectly healthy part of his body,” Jordan said.

“It’s just his foreskin.”

“Which he should’ve kept, which I’d have said let him keep if you’d bothered to ask me.”

“I know you would’ve said no.”

“Look, I’m trying to figure out if this really mattered to you, then wouldn’t you have waited a week instead of just getting it sliced off? You’re supposed to wait a week to do it, right? Get a special blanket and a professional in here? You just wanted it removed. What was even the _point_ of that?”

“I’m starting to get the feeling this isn’t entirely about Jack’s penis.”

All Jordan cared about was that Jack had cried for five minutes solid after the circumcision. Not the part where at five minutes and four seconds he was calming down in Cox’s arms and at five minutes forty-five seconds he was back to quiet introspection about life’s great existentialist quandaries and at twelve minutes he was asleep. By his next feeding he was fine, like it’d never happened, the only evidence of it a lack of a tiny piece of skin that was effectively ornamental at this point in Western society and not worth a big deal one way or the other.

Cox wondered what Paige would have to say about it. Not enough to call her twice in the same month, but enough to almost want to. She’d been happy to chat briefly – he’d made sure to call her in the late afternoon in California so it’d be early evening back in Pennsylvania, and she understood Jack wasn’t up for verbal long-distance communication. They’d both hung up after ten minutes, more than enough time to tell each other congratulations and that they were all doing fine, generally speaking. He’d left out a lot of the details she didn’t need, like how he was still waiting to pass a bowel movement and how the nurses taped plastic over the incision site for the sponge baths, and just told her what she did, like that Jack had brown eyes and enjoyed being rocked and carried.

That Jack enjoying being rocked and carried made it easier for Cox to get the exercise he himself needed wasn’t something he told Paige, but he figured she could put that together on her own if she did a bit of reading about post-Caesarean recoveries.

One more reason to be thankful he put Carla on the visitor’s list: she already knew it all.

“Are you gonna get one of those little baby backpacks?” she asked, shuffling along the hallway beside him while a nurse trailed behind. “It’d leave your hands free if you need to hold something else.”

“When he gets a bit bigger, sure, but I’m fine for now.” Bearing through the pain was straightforward enough. Standing up straight against the staples’ pulling and tugging was the hard part. “He’s only seven pounds, that’s hardly worth complaining about even after major surgery.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Seven pounds and?”

“And _about_ ten ounces but he ate just before you got here so I’m rounding to the closest pound for the sake of casual conversation.”

“Good for him. What about you?”

“Finally managed a BM today.”

“Nice.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“It means I can share what I brought with me. Don’t worry, I asked ahead and the nurses said if you’d passed anything by the time I came over I could let you have some.”

“As long as it’s real outside food. Please tell me it’s real outside food.”

“It was my mother’s secret weapon for getting through the worst of her nausea right after delivery. But I think you’ll like them too.”

“When we’re back in the room,” Jeanine said as she followed after them.

When Cox was back in bed and Carla pulled the little bag out of her purse with what a practiced flourish, he could almost hear a drumroll; when he took a bite, he knew he heard trumpets. Dark chocolate covered orange peels, sweet and bitter, boiled in sugar and still tart enough for any citrus. He forced himself to go slowly, at least two bites per piece and only three pieces. The peel was good enough he’d have eaten it plain, the chocolate melted perfectly without overwhelming his tired taste buds, and together the two parts were the most delicious thing he’d eaten since Jack began issuing edicts about what his mother wouldn’t consume during his gestation.

“Thank you,” Cox said after his fifth piece. “But do you think you could maybe bring me a steak sandwich next time?”

“You poor thing. Are they not feeding you well enough here?”

“His appetite’s fine,” Jeanine said, reaching over his legs to grab another piece. “But we’d have to confiscate it and eat it ourselves. No red meat or other heavy proteins for the first eight days, remember, Perry?”

“But I _miss_ it.”

“You’ll be out of here before you know it, and then you can buy yourself whatever you want to eat. Right now, your friend’s candy aside, we set the menu. And if you want more of those, grab them now because you’ve had plenty and I don’t want to see you hiding snacks in here.”

“If you ever wanna come work at a regular hospital, we could use someone like you,” Carla said.

“I’ve got a few years to go with this. But who knows after that? It’s a nice town, it’d be nice to stay. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You’d be working with me, not over me,” Cox said.

“I’d be sure not to hold it against you,” Jeanine replied. Carla laughed, and Cox allowed her to kiss Jack good-bye before visiting hours ended and Jeanine escorted her out. They closed the door behind them, and as soon as Cox knew they were gone, he took Jack and settled back in bed with him in his arms.

Carla would be talking as soon as her next shift started. It was one thing for everyone at Sacred Heart to know he’d had a baby, but the image of his baby sleeping in his arms wouldn’t be a good one to get out if he needed to return with his reputation roughly intact. He couldn’t control what the doctors and nurses told Carla, could only request they not share incriminating or embarrassing details, just manage his image and composure while she was here.

The Study’s nurses didn’t particularly care if he slept with Jack in bed with him, so long as he gave him up as needed.

Of all the things he could do to make his life that much easier to bear through, having Jack in his arms as much as possible was the single best of them.

Living with a newborn was already a fair bit like the first days of residency after med school: his time wasn’t his own, he slept when he could for as much as he could, he was genuinely living in the hospital with no clear end to his shift in sight, everyone was asking things of him he could barely comprehend, all he wanted was a turkey sandwich and a night in his own bed, and he smiled and threw himself into everything everyone needed him to do because that was the only way through. He slept when Jack slept. If Jack needed to eat, he woke up and fed him. When the nurses needed him for something, he didn’t bother putting on clean scrubs and just followed them where he needed to go, did what they asked of him, and then fumbled back to his room and closed the door.

The biggest difference, besides Jack, was having his own bed instead of whatever bunk was free in the on-call room. Closing it didn’t mean nobody came in – there wasn’t any locking it against the nurses, there sure as shit wasn’t any locking it against Hanrahan – but it gave him the chance to pretend he could. His days were more than full enough.

Next to Jack and his own bed, having his nights reasonably free to himself was the only other major distinction. The days had meetings about how he was feeling, what he was eating, the chemical composition of his urine and the bacteria he passed in his stool, his calcium and iron and vitamin levels, what he was looking forward to when he got out, and how he was taking it while he was in here. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t manage, and thankfully, nobody expected him to smile. There were a few regular check-ups throughout the nights, and Jack wasn’t yet old enough to sleep for more than four hours at a stretch and then only if he was entirely exhausted, but for the most part, when it got dark, Cox got to be alone.

Alone with Jack, and sometimes that was the same.

Their first night together, Cox had been drifting inside his own head and untethered from his body from the surgery and pain medication, and Jack had been trying to come to terms with being born. It’d been a hard day for them both, and it was only just as the sun was setting they were allowed some time alone with each other. Cox had been advised to get as much sleep as he could – even as disconnected as he’d been, he’d appreciated the quantification – and had done his best to do just that, not waking up until Jack told him he was hungry and needed to eat. 

It was impossible to fall asleep while Jack nursed. Not because of any romantic notion about feeling bad about missing a feeding, but because no matter how much nipple exercising he’d done, no matter how much he’d expressed, no matter how tightly he held a pillow to the incision site, it still hurt when Jack ate. It felt great when the colostrum flowed, and it made him proud to know he could feed his son without resorting to any supplemental help, but Cox couldn’t lie back and doze while Jack nursed, so he settled in to watch until he was finished.

“Baby boy, baby boy, little baby, yeah y –” Cox whispered, then stopped, rubbing a hand over his face. He switched Jack from one nipple to the other, clenching his teeth to keep from hissing in pain while he latched, and tried again, pitching his voice up as much as he could while staying as quiet as possible. “Yeah, hey, hey, hey there little baby, little-Jack-little-Jack, hey yeah, little – little…” Cox swallowed hard, looked around the room to make sure nobody with any long-term memory had heard him babbling like that.

“Hey, Jack. Yeah, that’s good, you’re eating really well for someone who’s just started doing it,” he whispered. Not high, just quiet. “Yeah, like that, like you’re doing right now, keep on just like that. Good job, Jack.”

After he was done, Cox paged for a nurse and got Nadia, who changed Jack while she babbled to him both quietly and sing-song and, when she came back three hours later, made a face when she saw he wasn’t in the crib where she’d left him. When he pressed, she said there wasn’t anything wrong with the arrangement, as such: “I thought you were fine with the two of you each in your own bed.”

“I thought it’d be easier for him to sleep with me.”

“That’s true for any significant number of reasons, but for safety reasons we’d rather you didn’t, just because these are single hospital beds, not queen-sized mattresses. But please don’t take that as an invitation to sneak around regulations. If you’d rather start co-sleeping now…” He nodded to fill the silence. “…then in that case I’ll pass the request along and get back to you with a genuine response.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Jack didn’t leave his arms until the morning, and then only for the time it took the nurses to bathe and change him. When they were alone in their room again, Cox didn’t last long before he started talking again, this time pointing out the yellow-billed magpies roosting in the eucalyptus trees and describing their status as a uniquely endemic species found only in a single state in the continental United States.

“Yes, I know you don’t yet have the visual acuity to see anything that far away, never mind something so small and fast, but the constant human speech has got to be helping you out somehow. And I’m sorry about the baby-talk last night. Maybe it’s true it helps you to hear sounds like that to pick up the English phonemes, but you’d better believe I’m not doing that. You don’t need to hear it from me. I talked to you for _months_ before I could hold you and I never talked to you like that. I know you know what I sound like. I’m not faking what I sound like now that you can finally hear me without anything in the way.”

Jack just looked at Cox’s face and blinked. Cox smiled, and Jack kept his gaze on him. Nadia hadn’t asked, so he hadn’t told her why he’d wanted Jack with him, not just because all he’d need to do was move him in range of a nipple and that’d be that, not just because Jack was warm and solid against his chest and that helped the incision hurt less when the painkillers ebbed away: mostly because it felt too nice to be in the bed alone without him. Cox knew it was just exhaustion, that it wasn’t anything to do with how he really felt, that it would be better, much better, to have Jack with him because as soon as he was better rested and recovered, this was how things were going to be. It’d be nice, and it’d be good, and even if it seemed like all he wanted was ten minutes of time to himself, he’d just given birth and that was the only reason why, and he knew he’d stop feeling that way soon.

“Hello,” he whispered, and held his smile and his tears. “I’m so happy you’re here.”


	22. There’s a man who’s been out sailing in a decade full of dreams

_I haven’t – I mean, it hasn’t been – no. Sorry. Can we just talk about something meaningless for a while?_

_Of course we can._

_We could talk about…I don’t know what you talk about when you’re not talking to me. I’m sorry. I know I should know that._

_It’s okay._

*

When Jordan had first heard the news that the Matthias Study had managed to successfully impregnate one of its test subjects, she’d laughed because there wasn’t any other way to react to that sort of world-shattering mad science. It took her a moment to stop and realize the news meant nine months of momentum gathering up before that first unlucky bastard gave birth to that first unlucky baby. She knew the next nine months would be a shitshow as the world geared up for the shitstorm, and that wasn’t even taking the mother himself into account.

Until Susan was born, it was just one of the test subjects, or the potential mother, or things no newspaper would print and television and radio stations would edit out with careful beeps. When she was born, the guy at least got the consolation of earning a consistent pseudonym.

During those nine months, especially as Perry got farther and farther along in getting ready to join the rank and file of those secure enough in their masculinity that pregnancy wouldn’t impugn upon it in any way, shape, or form who were willing to volunteer to help break nature apart, Jordan tried and failed to not pay attention. Though she felt it was to her credit that it was impossible to not somehow pay attention to what was happening. Beyond the newspapers, beyond the magazines, beyond the interviews with the people in the Study, who’d backed the Study before it’d been much of anything because they’d believed that hard, who’d dropped out of it when they thought it wouldn’t go anywhere and who’d retired from it secure that it’d eventually end up where it needed to go, there was still the fact that everyone talked about it.

When Perry had gotten pregnant, Jordan knew her direct involvement in the Study, such as it was, remained secure and confidential. A conversation about Oliver one afternoon, a brief interview and some needles and ice cream a while later, her name on some of the paperwork, and even now Kath and Oliver didn’t know who the seventh baby’s second parent was. 

Most of Sacred Heart knew she and Perry were sleeping together, Kath and Oliver included, but nobody knew about her relationship to the baby. She was fine with that. It meant she got a little cold shiver up her spine whenever something referred to the non-gestational genetic parent, like being an anonymous source in a murder investigation. She was also fine with going back to work four days after Jack was born because she’d had a good hot shower that morning and after seven of them the births were finally below the fold on the newspaper’s front page.

It didn’t happen the _exact_ moment she stepped into the building, but within fifteen paces of the door, she remembered where she worked.

“I can’t even imagine it, going _through_ that when he didn’t have to – surrogacy’s still a thing, right?” A surgeon said to an orderly as they passed her in the hallway.

“Oliver’s still waiting. He’s near to the bottom of the list and he’s getting more and more impatient, but I keep telling him it’s really not that long,” Kath said to another doctor, not noticing Jordan as she walked by.

“It’s not a _bad_ name, really, but I guess when you grow up with one like his you want something a little more plain,” a lab tech said to three more standing around the coffee machine.

“I mean, thank God we changed maternity policy here, or else we’d have an actual lawsuit on our hands. Did you hear what the Study did for the fifth mother, remember, for baby Aaron? When he couldn’t get maternity leave?” A nurse leaned back against the wall and sighed. “I mean, it just gives me a good feeling for when I get pregnant.”

“Can you imagine how great it’d be to have your own boobies right there, all the time, with your penis there too?” A surgeon said, laughing. “Best-of-both-worlds five!”

“Where do you think he got the egg?”

“Excuse me?” Jordan spun around and saw she was talking to Espinosa, who didn’t shrink down and just shrugged at her. “What are you talking about?” 

“It’s really nothing, Miss Sullivan.”

“No, now I’m curious.”

“All right.” The nurses looked between each other, like a herd of llamas, and then Espinosa looked back to Jordan. “We’re just wondering how since Doctor Cox doesn’t have any ovaries, he must’ve gotten the egg from someone else. And we’d _heard_ the doctors in the Matthias Study donate them themselves if they have to, but we’d _also_ heard they have a bank of them from anonymous donors, so we’re not trying to –” 

“Believe what you want, they’re three miles away, you could _walk_ there and ask them. Make an appointment. Whatever,” she huffed, and left for her board meetings.

There were enough of them throughout the day to make sticking around Sacred Heart worthwhile. Kind of like being in college and having enough classes throughout the day that not leaving campus until five o’clock was a good idea. The first two were back-to-back, but there was a brief lull period before the next, and the next round wouldn’t be until well after lunch, so Jordan decided to spend that time eating outside in the late March sunshine. On the roof.

She couldn’t remember the putting green being there before, so it _had_ been a while.

Her father had always taken them up here when her mother hadn’t been looking. It wasn’t that the roof was a secret place people had to sneak onto because anyone could get up there if the door was unlocked. Since it was just five floors, rock-climbing equipment could also do the job, and Jordan smiled, imagining suiting up just to spend a few minutes outside with a decent view of the horizon.

She was barely halfway through her sandwich when she heard the door to the stairwell creak open and sneakers on gravel completely failing to sneak, and turned around to see Perry’s pet intern waving at her sheepishly. “Oh, hello there Miss Sullivan, I didn’t think anyone else was up here. Not that I usually sneak out onto the roof, just that when I do – I mean, when I have a few minutes to myself during the day then sometimes I –” 

“Listen, Artie, there’s more than enough roof for me to ignore you from way over there, so I don’t care if you’re allowed up here or not, just don’t play hooky in this general vicinity, got it?”

He froze in place and then straightened up and shook that head of massively gelled hair. “I’ll just be over here, then.” Jordan turned around and listened to him pace off to the other side of the rooftop. She could imagine him glancing over at her, tossing a glare her way, and huffing like a kitten before settling in to stare out at the foothills because she’d picked the side of the roof that looked out over town. From where she stood, she could see out to where the university campus was, and if anything had been built a little taller she might even have been able to see some of the structures themselves. Instead, she could just see where she knew it was.

“But if you do see Doctor Cox just tell him we’re all very proud and that we’re looking forward to him coming back,” Dorian called out just before the door slammed, and all Jordan saw when she turned around was that she was alone.

The rest of the day’s meetings were boring enough to help her along, but they weren’t enough to get her all the way there. She hadn’t had enough time to do enough background reading and research that she could just nod through them and then cast her vote without participating in any of the discussions – sure, they were boring, but she had to pay attention. Which would have been fine enough on its own, a reminder to make sure she had at least one night a week for this, but after everything was wrapped up and she was getting ready to leave, Karl had the gall to ask her how she was.

“Fine, until you decided it was any of your business.”

“It’s nothing, only that you’ve been a little out of sorts of late, and you know if anything’s concerning you, I’d be happy to do what I can.”

“If I had something that couldn’t be fixed by some me time, I’d definitely think about calling you.”

“Just as long as you remember that.”

“Thanks.”

“Do take care.”

None of them knew. It kept thudding around her head as she drove home, how none of them knew. She knew that made perfect sense, given that she and Perry hadn’t been stupid enough to tell anyone, especially the people at Sacred Heart, but walking through the hospital untouched by all the discussions and rumors and ideas floating around like low-hanging storm clouds or fog banks hadn’t been nearly as amusing as she’d thought it’d be.

Having a secret about things other people cared about was something Jordan always savored. It was a tiny bit of power nobody knew she had, that she could use if she wanted, whether they knew she knew or if they didn’t – she’d carried around how she’d slept with JD for months, savoring the ideas and imagining the possibilities of how best to use that little nugget. But today, carrying around the secret that she’d supplied the other half of Jack’s genes had felt more like the last few weeks of her and Perry’s marriage than anything else she could think of.

He’d stayed faithful to her, even in the worst of it. Even at the end, he hadn’t known, not until she’d told him. It was the end of their marriage and his and Peter’s friendship no matter how he found out, and Jordan knew it’d be better if Perry heard it from her. Not all that much better, but enough to make the difference. To know she had to sit him down and be the one to tell him.

It wasn’t as though not telling anyone she happened to be a genetic donor for one of the babies produced by the Matthias Study was anywhere near close to having cheated during her marriage. One was breaking a promise of marital fidelity and the other was respecting the privacy and confidentiality of a participant in a medical study. It wasn’t keeping information away out of guilt: she literally hadn’t asked for permission to share. If she told anyone, it’d be breaking trust and respect and probably a half-dozen laws at the same time, but it wasn’t anything like not telling Perry about the cheating. She could ask if it was all right to let people know. Nobody was stopping her from asking.

But if she asked Perry, he’d know she wanted to. And if she didn’t, she’d have to keep on carrying it.


	23. You walked into my house last night

_I keep thinking how this is going to end soon._

_The hospital stay?_

_That too. I meant just this, the way it is now with Jack and me. How – look, no matter how much the nurses are helping out, he doesn’t need them the way he needs me. That’s how it is, the plain, simple fact of the matter._

_That’s true._

_Believe me, I’m excited to get out of here and get back home because it’ll mean I’ll have gotten these staples out._

_Yeah, vaginal delivery has a lot of advantages to it._

_Cadwallader’s already given me that spiel. But in any case._

_In any case, you like that your son relies on you for his basic needs._

_I do. I know it’s not going to last, and I know it’s going to be over before I know it, but while it’s here, I’m trying to enjoy it. Appreciate it. At least, as much as I can before he lets me sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. I…I’m sure I could give him to the nurses overnight, if I needed to. If I really needed to._

_Why don’t you feel like you need that?_

_He needs this more than I do right now._

_Being with you all the time._

_It won’t take long before he doesn’t need me. Not like he needs me right now. So, yes. I’m trying to spend as much time with him at this point in his life as I possibly can because I know it’ll be over so soon._

*

Cox had thought that his pregnancy-related food issues would be done with once he gave birth. He’d almost thought it’d happened when his stomach didn’t clench at the smell of the meat broth that was his first post-delivery breakfast, or the way Carla’s chocolate orange peels hadn’t been overwhelmingly sweet. As he healed up, and needed less and less pain medication, his appetite came back without any trouble and a good deal of praise. The energy to do something about that appetite had taken a bit longer. 

Ben was kind enough to bring him a full meal’s worth of food every time he visited and didn’t mind that Cox insisted he stay and talk while he ate. It wasn’t that he was so hungry he needed to eat the food right that second even if his friend was there in the room: it was more that on some level if Ben wasn’t there to distract him, it’d take him ages to eat everything. On some level, it was easier to stay hungry than to try to eat anything.

But Jack needed him to eat so _he_ could eat. So Cox did what he could, and kept a game face, and tried his best to stand up straight when he had to leave the bed.

Jordan managed to come by twice, although since the second time was when they needed a drive home because the two of them were finally getting discharged, Cox wasn’t sure if it counted.

“I’m not the one keeping track. Count it if you want, I won’t make you if you don’t.” She leaned against the far wall, beneath the TV Cox hadn’t ever bothered to turn on. “But the fact that you think me providing you a ride home is anything more than me getting another favor out of you really speaks wonders to just how low you’ve set the bar on relationship participation. For this one, I think I’ll get your your Porsche for a weekend. That seems fair, right, Ben?”

“You mean a regular weekend or a three-day weekend?” Ben asked as a nurse took Jack so Cox could change in the suite’s bathroom. “Because if you’re getting the Porsche for a three-day weekend, I’ll want to get in on that. If I’m driving you two – sorry, you three home, then I think I should get some time behind that wheel.” He was still grinning when Perry got out of the bathroom in clean scrubs. Once Jack began sleeping through the nights, he’d be back in his usual jeans in six months, tops.

“Any and every time-share discussion regarding my car can come – gnnhhh.” He’d gotten the staples out already, but bending over to tie his shoelaces and straightening back up still had a more-than-reasonable amount of pain from his lower stomach. Knowing it was one of the good kinds of pain didn’t make it hurt less. “They can wait until I’m discharged and home, and then we can all sit down and have a nice chat to work out the details. Thank you, Carrie.” The nurse smiled as he took Jack into his arms. His son was awake and alert and, having eaten just before Jordan and Ben arrived, quiet and calm for Ben’s snapshots and his first car ride. He fell asleep just as they arrived and napped for three hours, allowing the adults a chance for an honest sit-down meal at the kitchen table with time for some conversation before he started crying out for his own dinner.

Even in an unfamiliar place, he latched on right away, and Cox knew the glider was worth every penny when the back-and-forth calmed Jack down right away after a bath he kept fussing through, getting water in his eyes and shrieking at the indignity of the pain. The glider kept working when he moved from Cox’s arms to Ben’s for the time it took Cox to take a careful shower. If that had been the end of the evening, then that would have been perfectly fine, except Jordan joined him and Jack in the nursery a few minutes later. Since she walked in wearing pajamas, it clearly wasn’t to say good-bye.

Ben had explained he and Jordan would be sticking around for at least a few days, no more than several, at least until Jack was on a regular schedule himself no matter what time zone he was convinced he was residing in. He wasn’t staying over, though, and Cox thought that would be true for his sister as well

“Ready to come to bed?” she asked quietly. Jack had finished feeding and dozed off, and Cox hadn’t returned him to the crib.

“I was, but now I’m concerned something’s taken up residence in my house while I was away and is even now lurking in the dark, waiting for me to let my guard down to rip the flesh from my bones and feast on my corpse.”

“Please, everyone knows that it’s the babies monsters want to eat, not the mothers. Come on. Your bed’s gotta be more comfortable than that chair.”

“Is there some sort of catch to this?”

“What? No, no catch.”

“Because asking me to come to bed with you for reasons _besides_ sex comes dangerously close to affectionate for you.”

“Given the time I’ll need to get used to your fat, flabby self so I’ll want to have sex with it and the amount of work it’ll take you to get back to your regular fighting weight, this is entirely self-motivated.”

“I can live with that.”

“Good. Now, let’s go.”

“All right, we’re coming.”

“We? Is this some sort of royal _I speak the whole of the kingdom_ we thing?” She chuckled as she got into bed, stopped when she looked at him standing in the doorway with Jack in his arms, and silently demanded he give her a reason to not be upset about seeing something she didn’t like. He’d gotten a lot of that look before they’d divorced, and he gave her one right back, letting her know there was nothing she could do about it.

“Quiet, he’s asleep.”

“What is this? What happened to the nursery?”

“Nothing’s happened to it. It’s still there. It’s not going anywhere. We’re not _using_ it just yet, if that’s what you mean.”

“Perry, you’re still recovering from major surgery and I’m sure you’re just bathing in baby-eating hormones right now, but remember: baby bedroom down the hall, grown-up bedroom here, not the same thing.”

“Co-sleeping at this stage is completely safe. We slept together in the hospital. It’s not a big deal. Besides, do you _want_ me to get out of bed and head all the way down there if he wakes up?”

“If that means you feed him there and not where I’m sleeping, _yes_ , Perry, I do.”

“All right.” He nodded. “Too bad. Scoot over.”

“Um, no. Go put him to bed. I’ll get some earplugs, you turn on the baby monitor – you’ve got one of those, right? – and it’ll be just like I don’t –”

“If you’ve changed your mind about wanting a sleepover, it’s okay. I’ll call your mother and she’ll come get you and you can spend the rest of the night back home.”

“I’m not saying I don’t want to be here, I’m saying I don’t want to do the sharing-a-bed-with-an-infant thing. You, even right now, sure. Him _and_ you, no. His bedroom’s down the hall, so why doesn’t he go there?”

“Because he sleeps with me, and if I’m sleeping in here, then this is where he sleeps.”

“I’m sure you were the darling of the nurses and the staff for being _such_ an attached parent, and that’s got to say _so much_ for everything they’re looking for about early mother-child bonding, but there are so many reasons this can’t be a good idea.”

“You’re right that it’s about attachment, and it’s also about convenience while he’s nursing, and –”

“Okay, enough,” she threw off the covers and stalked over, “you can let this go now, he’s out of the hospital and at home. This isn’t how people raise kids except in hippie communes, and we’re not in a yurt in the foothills.”

“I honestly didn’t think you’d ever be so invested in being a parent as to argue with my decisions about Jack.”

“When they’re bad decisions, yes, I will.”

“I might consider taking your complaints seriously if you didn’t think every decision I’ve made so far a bad one, which only goes to make me think you’re disagreeing with me for old time’s sake. If you don’t want to have sex with Jack here then that I can understand, but if there’s something else on your mind, I’d love to hear it.”

“If you’d think about _Jack_ when you make decisions instead of what _you_ want, maybe, maybe! Then I might be able to understand why you’re making them, but this is just you clinging to some ideal you know you can’t live up to, and it’s not a good look for you, Perry, so just leave it.”

“And if you’d think about the fact that _I’m his goddamn mother_ and the person most qualified to _make_ these decisions, and how you’d happily see –”

That was the moment the earth broke in half, and the baby in his arms was the one who broke it, howling.

“Oh fuck, fuck, Jack, I’m sorry, sorry, fuck – goddamn it, I’m so sorry –” Whispering wasn’t helping, and he tried rocking him in his arms, but his already being there didn’t make it as helpful as Cox had hoped. His head was pounding and he tried not to panic or burst into tears himself, sitting down on the bed and trying to get Jack to latch to a nipple even though he’d just eaten – there had to be better things he could do but none came to mind, none so immediate. It still worked. Jack wasn’t crying anymore, and that was the point. Even if it hurt with him latched on like this, with all the pulling on his scar, with it already empty so there wasn’t even the good tugging feeling from the milk letting down. It just hurt, but Jack wasn’t crying. When Cox looked up, Jordan was gone. She wasn’t in the room, and probably not in the house.

But his ex-wife was hardly the biggest thing he had on his mind.

The pounding faded, his anger ebbing out. They could’ve argued quietly, they could’ve talked about it beforehand, maybe he could’ve managed getting up and staggering off to the nursery and sleeping in the glider, something, anything but what they’d done. There shouldn’t have been anything to make Jack cry.

In the hospital, Cox’s schedule had been dictated first by Jack, second by the nurses, third by the Study’s doctors, and way off on the horizon, fourth by himself. He’d known getting home would be a relief in and of itself. Just walking through the door and getting back home. Cox hadn’t tried to fool himself into thinking everything would be sunshine and roses from that moment on, but he’d hoped the honeymoon period would have lasted more than seven hours.

“Shh, shh…” He rocked Jack gently, voice soft, gently broke the latch and carried him back to the nursery, detoured just long enough to check and see that Jordan had actually gone. “You’re safe… you’re safe, buddy, it’s all safe, it’s all good now. I’m right here, nothing’s going to happen…” He changed his son’s diaper and kept whispering as he took him back to the bedroom. “Nothing to worry about, nothing at all. Just you and me here, that’s all.” Cox lay down, arranging the two of them on top of the covers like he’d wanted to before everything had shattered, reached out and stroked his son’s head as he slept. “It’s just you and me, Jack.”

If Ben had anything to say about his sister’s absence when he came by the next morning, he kept it to himself.


	24. All I know is everything is not as it seems

_So how are you today?_

_I’m doing fine. And yourself?_

_We’re both good. I’m glad to be here._

_That’s good to hear._

_Thanks for sending out the cab._

_That wasn’t me, but I’ll pass it along._

_Great. Great._

_How are you doing?_

_I just said we’re both fine._

_You’re adjusting to being back home okay?_

_Yeah, it’s fine._

_No problems with anything?_

_Nothing I’d think is all that strange._

_So what would you say you’re having typical problems with?_

_Not that much._

_All right._

_The co-sleeping’s good._

_Okay._

_It helps us both get a little more sleep – Jack’s sleeping fine, he always sleeps fine, but it’s easier for me, and it doesn’t bother him. So I’m up to maybe five or six hours a night._

_In total?_

_Yeah. Sometimes I’ll nap a bit in the afternoons along with him, so maybe six, six and a half in a full twenty-four hours period. It’s…I’m still not used to it, since it’s bits here and there, and it’s hard to get into the deep-sleep cycles and phases, but it’s enough. I’m here talking to you, and we’re having a reasonably adult conversation._

_I’m glad to see you in here._

_Thank you. It’s nice to get out of the house at this point, and it’s nice to hear you’re happy to see me, too._

_You’d said you were worried about not being able to make it._

_That was last week. Don’t worry, I’ll be up to coming next week, no problem._

*

Jordan knew the talk at Sacred Heart would be worse with time, not better, and wouldn’t stop until Perry got back from maternity leave. He was all over the place – when he might be coming back, if he’d cut down his hours, whether he’d go so far as to wear the kid during rounds like some sort of backpack, if he’d gone ahead and decided to become a stay-at-home mother – and going home only did so much because unlike Perry, she wasn’t refusing any and all news about the world beyond medical journals and the science section. It didn’t help that every so often, someone wrote something about her, too, the genetic non-gestational parent who hadn’t even done enough to warrant a dispassionate set of initials. 

With Ben back to traveling the world, Danni still out of the loop, and her mother off-limits for this sort of thing, she couldn’t exactly invite anyone close to her into a conversation about things without blowing all the confidentiality agreements clear out of the water.

That said, torpedoing about half of them seemed fine. Going by the precise wording of the contracts, and speaking to someone who was already a part of things that she’d been talking to about his participation for nearly a full year, and making sure she stayed careful, she could sit herself down at someone’s kitchen table while his daughter ran around the backyard and let him hand her a big cup of coffee, dark and sweet, without any worry.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Oliver said as he joined her, his own coffee steaming the scent of hazelnuts and cream across the table. “It’s nice of you to drop by. Especially when I had no idea you’d planned on coming and there’s three days of laundry that needs folding.”

“That’s the fun of it. Sorry. I should’ve called.”

“Honestly, I really don’t mind. It’s out of the dryer anyway, it can wait another hour. It’s just that this is a little surprising – you usually like giving out a little advance notice, even if it’s just for coffee.” He leaned in closer. “So what’s on your mind?”

“It’s about Perry.”

“What about Perry? Oh, congratulations to him, by the way.”

“I’ll pass it on when I see him. But – the thing is, the thing I’m here to talk about, it’s…” She sighed. “I guess it’s congratulations to me, too.”

“For what?”

“It’s my baby, too.”

“It’s your – holy shit, Jordan. Sorry. I just had no idea – I didn’t know you wanted to be a parent. Congratulations to you too, absolutely. It was a boy, right? Perry had a boy?”

“He did.” She took a long drink of coffee that was just a little too hot to pleasantly slide down her throat. “We did. I guess. He did all the work. I just let them grab an egg and feed me some ice cream afterwards.” She sighed. “Strawberry.”

“I’d have asked for chocolate chip, but that’s me.”

“This whole thing is that – can I trust you to keep quiet about this?”

“I’m basically under contract to.”

“Where are you in the line for this?”

“I’m going to be the fiftieth.”

“You’re going to be waiting a while.”

“I’d rather wait for this than not wait for anything. But yes, Jordan, you can trust me not to share. Not even with Kath if you don’t want me to.”

“Thanks.”

“So what is it?”

“It’s something I’d ask my dad about if he was around. And this isn’t because I think of him as some sort of long-gone lost idealized version of the embodiment of fatherhood or whatever. Because I don’t. It’s because he’s always the first person I think of when I think about fathers. Because he was mine. And I was trying to think if I knew another father close to me to talk about, and that’d be you.”

“That’s very flattering,” Oliver said, taking a long drink of coffee.

“And because you’re already in the Study,” Jordan said.

“Of course.”

“I’m – this thing, it’s about being a father. I know the whole line of what I am to the baby is a mouthful, but that’s what it all means. Perry thinks this is all about being a mother, it’s all about _him_ being a mother right now, and I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m not saying he’s right, either. I’m saying, what I think I’m saying, what I think I’m _trying_ to say is I want to know how you managed it. Being a father when the mother wasn’t letting anyone else in, when the mother…”

“When the baby was the mother’s whole world?”

“Yeah.” She looked up and nodded. “Yeah, like that.”

“All right. When you say Perry isn’t letting anyone in, could you tell me a bit about that?”

“Why?”

“Just humor me.”

Jordan glared, took another drink, opened her mouth, and let him have it. She didn’t give Oliver everything, but she gave him what she’d been waiting to unload since the moment Perry asked her to give him an egg. There were the lies that hurt worse than not saying anything, that he’d never taken a chance to tell her what he’d wanted from her no matter how many chances he got, the times he’d pretended to open up but had just been teasing her about the idea he could be emotionally close to anyone he hadn’t personally gestated himself. When she was done, Oliver just sat back and nodded.

“Well. I think I know what you’re talking about. Not _exactly_ , but when Margaret was born – I get where you’re coming from.”

“So can you help me or not?” Jordan leaned away from him.

“If you just need someone to listen to you, I can do that. But if you’re going to listen to me, I need you to brace yourself and not leave because it’s something you won’t want to hear.”

“I’m braced.”

“Jordan, really.”

“Go ahead.”

“All right.” He took a deep breath. “This isn’t about you.”

“Sorry?”

“This isn’t about you. I know that’s hard to grasp, but that’s what it is right now. I know you’d like to find something to point to and blame, but there’s nothing that can be blamed right now. What you’re feeling is a shitty thing. I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel it. It’s less that it’s fine you’re feeling it, it’s more that – look, I get you don’t want this. But what you need to get is that this isn’t about you.”

“I get that I didn’t have the baby out of my own uterus, but we’re talking about me right now, not Perry.”

“We’re talking about how you’re feeling, and if we’re doing that, we need to talk about Perry and your son. What was his name again?”

“Jack.”

“We need to talk about Perry and Jack. It’s about you and – all right. When Margaret was born, it wasn’t about me. It was about her and Kath. I was there, but at the beginning, I had to learn the hard way I didn’t matter the way I’d mattered just a few weeks earlier, before she was born. It’s not because fatherhood is secondary to the mother-child bonding process. It’s not like that.”

“What is it like, then? Can you get to the point?”

“The _point_ is that when a mother’s suffering from post-partum depression, the father has to suck it up, accept it’s not about them, and do whatever they can to be there for the mother. This isn’t about fathers. This is about mothers.”

“Perry’s not depressed.”

“Whatever the gender of the mother, there’s an ungodly amount of strain that comes from giving birth and caring for a newborn, especially for a first-time mother. Stress and strain and the biggest hormone crash anyone could ever possibly experience. Even when the mother’s an asshole of the highest order. I’m a little surprised it’s not more commonly known.” Oliver drained the last of his coffee and set the mug down carefully. “I’m not saying I’ve made a formal diagnosis because the closest I come to being a medical professional is that I’m married to one. But I knew Perry pretty well, and I know you very well, and I know neither of you do _happy_ easily. You didn’t exactly talk to him after the divorce, and I mean _right_ after the divorce, not unless you had an appointment with a lawyer present to find a way to hurt each other. Jordan, the two of you _destroyed_ each other. I’m sure you thought that was the point of the whole mess. If it was, you did everything perfectly. You hurt each other and did it hard. And now you’ve come here, and you sit down, and you act _surprised_ he’s not being honest with you about what he’s feeling.”

“Right.” Jordan nodded, slowly, to make her point, and did her best to keep her feelings off her face. They had hurt each other, and neither of them denied deserving it. But Jordan didn’t want Oliver to know that. “And that’s relevant to me how?”

“It’s relevant because if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be here.” He shrugged. “But you are. I don’t think I have anything else to say that wouldn’t be me repeating myself. Are you done? I can get that for you.”

“Thanks,” Jordan said, handing him the mug. “How about we wait until you have a kid, and then I can talk to Kath –”

“Yeah, why don’t you? Because this clearly isn’t getting through to you, even though you asked me if I had anything to say, which I did, so I’d think you’d at least do me the dignity of saying you don’t want to hear it.”

“I’m sure it’s good advice for someone else, but it isn’t relevant for me.”

“I’d say it is. But enough about me. And enough about you. How’s your son doing?”

“He’s doing fine.”

“Got any pictures?”

“I’m sure the _American Journal of Pediatrics_ will have some more out soon.”

“Dandy. You want another cup of coffee?” He held up and shook both mugs like maracas.

“Please. How’s Margaret?”

“She told me she wanted me to give her a sister.”

“Good luck with that.”


	25. Nightingale, sing us a song

_How was my week?_

_Yes._

_How was it?_

_That’s what I asked._

_Was I even around for it?_

_I’d think so._

_No, no, I was joking, of course I was around for it. It was my week, I was there._

_It sounded like you weren’t sure._

_I admit I spent a lot of time out of it._

_Sleeping?_

_No, just not really being there for it. Awake, sure. But…you know. Disconnected._

_All right._

_I spent some time crying, too._

_On-off crying?_

_No. Yes. That sort of crying. It’s happened a couple of times. When Jack’s asleep. I’d understand why I was doing it if I felt this giant swell of love in my chest when I look at him._

_Don’t you?_

_Sometimes. Fuck. Sometimes, what the hell am I saying. I know, but. I should feel bad about looking at him and sometimes not feeling anything. Not resentment. I don’t feel that, I promise you I don’t feel that. Ever. But sometimes there’s a whole lot of nothing where things should be. And…It’s not that I think there always needs to be something. I’d rather look at Jack and feel nothing than look at him and feel anger. But I think I might feel better about not feeling anything if I minded it._

_If you minded nothing._

_I don’t. It’s just there. It’s a lot of nothing. It’s some crying, it’s some laughing – good god does he make me laugh, and look at me, I’m smiling just thinking about him. And sometimes, it’s just a whole big pile of nothing._

*

A queen-sized bed wide enough for multiple people to sleep side by side was a vast improvement over the single-person hospital beds, if for no other reason than when Jack woke up hungry, all Cox needed to do was roll onto his side, get Jack attached to a nipple, and go back to sleep after he’d latched. His nipples were tough enough that nursing didn’t hurt anymore, and as much as he would have liked to lie awake for every feeding and watch his son eat, more often than not he barely surfaced from dreaming. Any guilt he had over not being awake and present for Jack in any capacity beyond feeding waited until morning, when he’d managed to scrounge at least five non-consecutive hours of sleep together.

If Jordan were here, she’d have something to say about things, maybe about keeping Jack on some draconian feeding schedule, but as she wasn’t, Cox left it up to Jack to decide the order of business. He knew he wasn’t up to much decision-making or schedule-setting yet; the co-sleeping helped some, but what he really wanted was an uninterrupted eight hours and wake up to the body he’d gone to sleep in before he’d gotten pregnant.

Since both of those things were out of the question, Cox settled for getting dressed around five-thirty when he couldn’t pretend lying in bed would get him any more rested than he already was. Jack slept on, oblivious to the shift in the mattress when Cox got out of bed, and it was mostly to not disturb Jack that he took a shower without turning on the lights, not to better ignore all the hair going down the drain. When he got dressed, it was still scrubs, would be scrubs until he had reason to head out the door, and not a moment earlier. Even then, it’d just be a clean pair of bottoms and possibly a hockey jersey over a top that could survive milk stains. 

“Hey, puppy, up we go, up and up,” he whispered, gathering up his son in his arms. “Keep sleeping, one of us should. I guess it’s good that it’s you because I can keep going, but you should have a while nobody’s waking you up for anything. Not for eating, not for bedtime; you sleep as much as you like and you eat whenever you want. Maybe it’s good you’re not going to remember this because it’s all downhill once you’re out of the uterus, but this is as close as it gets.”

Jack didn’t need to be changed, so Cox just stood and rocked him gently so he wouldn’t feel guilty about putting him back down long enough to head to the kitchen and muddle his way through some yogurt and toast and a cup of decaf before he woke up enough to attempt anything more complicated. It might have been the coffee’s smell, or that it was thick, warm, and bitter first thing in the morning, but even decaf, it helped. The few minutes of quiet helped, and before it got to be _nice,_ Cox sighed and stood up and brushed his teeth and went back to the bedroom where Jack had woken up and waited until he was in Cox’s arms to let rip a massive one that would’ve done half the football quarterbacks in America proud.

“Oh, you could at least demonstrate some pleasure in that. A little more relaxed? No, you were saving that for me, or no, you just don’t care?” He sighed. “Good sense of timing, though.”

There were chores to see through the day – housecleaning, laundry, throwing out the garbage, managing another pitiful cup of decaf – so Cox waited until Jack had another feeding before thinking of trying to get to them. If Jack went through another two-day bender of needing to stay in his mother’s arms at all times, Cox had to be prepared. Scrubs didn’t need to be folded, but towels and changing table covers needed to be put away. He wasn’t up to cooking but had to double-check what day it was to make sure he wouldn’t forget about the grocery delivery. Jack blew out his diapers with an epic shit that necessitated the tenth bath of his life, and that at least was worth both of them being reasonably awake for. Ben had cleaned the kitchen sink before he’d gone back on his world tour – cleaned and washed and scoured it, doing everything possible to sterilize and sanitize it except finishing it off with a blowtorch. And that was only because Cox didn’t have one. Ben had done enough of the heavy cleaning Cox only needed to wash it down after each bath, and right now, he didn’t need to worry too much when he gently lowered Jack into water at just the right temperature and kept a hand on him at all times to make sure nothing went wrong.

“Here we go,” he said. “Careful, careful, I think you might still remember breathing it, but you can’t breathe it anymore, puppy. Head above the water.” Just a squirt of soap, very gentle, and when Jack grabbed at his free hand Cox smiled and pulled away. “Do you remember that? Did you forget already? It’s been three weeks since you were born. Is that long enough to forget being inside your mother? Do people forget that because we can’t make such long memories when we’re as young as you’re now? Is it that we can’t sleep and dream enough to process anything to retain it? We’ve got people like me as mothers, we should focus on the big questions like that next.”

When Jack was done and napping, Cox scrubbed down the sink for the next bath and joined his son in the bedroom. He threw his shirt somewhere in the direction of the hamper and lay down on the bed with his son, pulled his legs up close and stuck his hands under the pillow and watched him breathe.

“Long day?” he whispered, reaching out to run his fingers down Jack’s body. He kicked at the air, and Cox felt a stab in his gut at the sight, at something he’d once had inside himself. Jack was something he’d carried inside his body, sustained, to see him all the way to living here. It was close but not the same when he gathered his son into his arms to feed him, and it was close but different when he held Jack to his chest to feel the warmth and weight of him. Holding his son was what he had wanted, but he missed carrying him more than he’d ever imagined.

Cox had several more weeks of maternity leave, and it was possible by the end of them, Jack would be sleeping through the nights and he might feel up to going back to work. It was also possible he’d take his unspent vacation days and tack those onto the end and stay here just a little bit longer. He missed work – missed _doing_ things, missed being a doctor, saving people, the work of medicine, the rush of the hospital. It was who he was, what he was supposed to be doing. The day he got back to work wouldn’t come too soon.

When a taxi arrived the next day to take them both to campus for their usual check-up appointment, Cox thanked them for sending it, and everyone cooed over Jack. It woke Cox up better than he’d been in days, and he felt almost present when they asked him questions he did his best to answer as truthfully as he could manage. The doctors measured everything about his body they thought was important enough to write down. They took his blood, they took his piss, they took his milk, and when they were done, they let him and Jack leave, the taxi they’d first dispatched to collect the two of them waiting to take them back home. Another few days and the two of them would do it all over again, but until then, his days were just for him and Jack.


	26. Hey now, little speedyhead

_I’m not saying people don’t change. I’m not saying they’re incapable of it._

_But the people you know don’t._

_The people I know who’ve managed to change – what few of them there were, they never made big productions out of it. My parents never changed. They never said they would, so I guess I have to give them that, but the people and the patients I’ve known who’ve said they’ve changed, they never did._

_Your sister converted to Christianity._

_Yes, but she doesn’t talk about it. Not just because we don’t talk. But because she knows that she doesn’t need to go on about it. The people that go on and on about how they’re someone different, how they’re not drug addicts anymore, how they’ve reformed, it’s not worth listening to because it’s all the same lie where they’re trying to convince themselves just as much as everyone around them. If you do manage to change, you just change. You don’t scream about it while you run down the hallway, you go on with the life you’re living and shut the hell up about it._

*

When the phone rang and it was Jordan on the other end, I should have known something was going wrong. It’s not that Jordan and I don’t ever talk – she’d called me to tell me she and Perry had gotten engaged, and the fact that I live in Pennsylvania meant our friendship wasn’t enough of an issue for anyone to make a big deal out of it during the divorce. We kept it going like nothing had changed, cards at the big holidays and calls for no reason besides wanting to hear how the other’s doing. But this was her calling me at home in the evening. Her evening, with the time difference between Pennsylvania and California, and Jordan is good about keeping that in mind and not calling too late. But nice as it was to say hi, it was more than a little unusual for her to do it so late.

“So how’s work?” she asked.

“Work is – it’s good. We’re gearing up for a publicity campaign about our food rescue program, you know about that? It’s mostly in the farmers’ markets, but we’re hoping to get enough of a push for the local grocery stores to join in. Some restaurants, too, if we can swing it right.”

“Yeah. Good luck with them.”

“Thanks. And yourself?”

“Hospital work, you know. Deciding if we’ve got enough money for one program or another, figuring out how to assess who really needs that new set of kidneys. Nothing new or different.”

“Seeing anyone?”

“It’s been a bit of a dry spell this past month. But spring break’s coming, and when the college students get let out of their cages, good things happen.”

“Provided they don’t latch on and expect the same special treatment for the rest of their undergrad career.”

“Exactly. Love ’em and leave ’em.”

“If ‘love’ is the right word for it.”

“Young, smooth, pretty. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”

“It sounds like you’re in for a good time,” I laughed. “You’ll let me know how it goes?”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

“So – what else is happening out west? Have you gotten a new dog yet? Your place lets you have a dog, right?”

“No, no pets except the ones you can keep in a tank.”

“Goldfish are nice.”

“I know you love yours, but I like something I can cuddle with on the couch.”

“Isn’t that what the college student’s for?”

“Just weekends and holidays. If I really wanted something to keep around for cuddling on demand I’d have to move again, and I haven’t even been here for two years yet. I’m worried it’ll feel like I’m back in college with all the moving around, packing and repacking every few months. It’s getting tiring.”

“If you’re sleeping with college students, you might as well get into their mindset.” Jordan almost laughed at that, but not really, just made a vague sort of near-chuckle that didn’t mean she thought it was funny at all. “Come on. Is something wrong?”

“No. Well. It’s not wrong. It’s not that there’s anything bad going on. Work’s fine, and it’s not even that I’ve had a lot of big decisions to make lately. I haven’t. It’s that – you can keep a secret, right?”

“Yes, I can.”

“It’s not…look, this isn’t for me. This isn’t for me.”

“What isn’t?”

“Give me a minute.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to have to say it more than once, so give me a minute to get it straight, all right?”

“All right,” I said, leaning back against the wall and looking out over the kitchen. I couldn’t reach the light switch from where I was standing, so the only light in the room came from the blinking red dot on the answering machine and from the streetlamps outside, the off-yellow brightness creeping in under the door from the living room. Everything was shadowy and quiet in my house, the way I liked it, and I waited for Jordan to talk, listening to her breathe as it got closer to midnight and tomorrow.

“Have you talked to Perry since Jack was born?”

“Yeah, twice. Why?”

“It’s that – okay. I’m not looking forward to drunken college student sex.” I wanted to say something like _I wouldn’t ever have guessed_ but held my tongue. “For a while, I’d been – Perry and I used to get together. Booty calls. For a while now, since about six months after we got divorced. Yes, I know, let me get this all out. Okay. We didn’t stop when he got pregnant, we just found other positions to get into, and I’ll leave it at that. I just wanted someone I knew would be available, and it’s not like I couldn’t have found someone, it was just that Perry was always there, and it was easier in a lot of ways because we still hated each other. It wasn’t ever going to be a relationship, and we knew that. We stopped a little while ago. And now things aren’t – I don’t like the idea of heading back out there, and if it was just another round of sex with someone I’d never speak to again, I wouldn’t mind going all-out for that. But I don’t think it is. It’s…I don’t miss being married. I like not being married. I don’t want to _be_ married again, not ever. So I don’t know what this is. Why I don’t feel like working my way through this spring’s graduating class. God, listen to me. I’m sorry for dumping this off on you, I should –”

“No. Honestly, it’s fine, I swear it’s _fine_. If this was a bad time to talk I’d have said so already.”

“Look, thank you for talking to me, but –”

“Jordan.” She was about three words away from hanging up the phone, so I took a deep breath I knew she could hear before I went on. This wasn’t the time to be anything but sincere. “Do you want me to yell at you, or do you want me to say you’re doing this all wrong?”

Half-afraid she’d just hang up, I waited for her to finally say, “Both, a little.”

“Is that what you need me to do to help, or is that what you want to feel better?”

“God, I don’t know! I just – I don’t even _care_ right now, I don’t –”

“Because I _can_ yell at you, and I _will_ yell at you, if I knew all you needed was _someone just fucking yelling at you!_ ” I heaved out a big, deep breath, my free hand shaking. “There. Feel better now?”

“A little.”

“Good. Glad I could help. Oh, good morning, too.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s morning here now.”

“Oh.”

“It’s fine. Really. I want to make sure _you’re_ fine, though, and if you needed someone to yell at you, then I know you’re not.”

“If your brother was half as good at this as you are, we’d still be married.”

“If I was in his place, we’d still have gotten divorced.” That made her laugh, and I finally started to unclench. “Trust me, it wouldn’t have gone well for either of us.”

“Okay, I earned that.”

“Is this something you think you can talk about? If it’s not, I can yell some more, or just tell you it’ll be fine, or tell you you’re a sack of crap, if that’d help.”

“The yelling helped.”

“I’m not usually one to contribute to someone else’s own faulty confirmation biases, since we both know you’re not a sack of crap.”

“Do you have any quick advice for not feeling like a sack of crap?”

“If you’re asking that question, you know there isn’t any.”

“Dammit.”

“But if you find some, let me know.”

“No, I just – you gotta do the thing where you empty out the sack. You know? Really extend the metaphor beyond its logical end point.”

“Far, far beyond. Off into the horizon.”

“Way out there. Empty out the sack and then keep going.”

“I know where to find a figurative field.”

“It’s okay. Thanks for the listening and the yelling.”

“I’m glad I could help.”

“Look, we both ought to head to bed.”

“Now? Yes. You know to call me if you need to talk?”

“I will. Good night.”

“G’night.”

I’d already prayed before going to bed a few hours ago, but I knew I was too wound-up to get back to sleep soon if I didn’t do it again. Jordan’s call had turned it into one of those nights I needed to take some time to center myself and focus on finding my strength for tomorrow. Between becoming an aunt and Easter coming up and one of my good friends not realizing she was still in love with my brother, I needed as much of it as I could gather.

Perry called me from the hospital the day after Jack was born, a day before the news of my nephew hit the world. I bought as many newspapers as I could, and I know someday I’ll get all the articles framed. He called me again a little while after he and Jack came home from the hospital, to let me know they were both doing fine. Put together, they’d taken up twenty minutes of my life. We hadn’t talked about Jordan because it’d never occurred to me in a thousand years she would’ve gone back to sleeping with him, and he hadn’t mentioned her at all. Which was very much like my brother, and it’s something I hope he doesn’t give that to his son.

At least we both came by it honestly. When we were kids, we knew what would keep us safe, and by the time I was eight and he was twelve we’d already turned into adults and couldn’t go back and change what we’d learned. But we’d always been there for each other, as much as we could. Even when he moved away to California and I uprooted myself from Pittsburgh, even when we talked for less than an hour a year, we still knew we were _there_ for each other. From how he’d sounded when we’d talked, he was the honest flat-out exhausted of a new mother, but he sounded tired underneath that, too. I knew if I was there in California – if he wanted me to be there, I’d go, and once I got there, I’d help him. How, I don’t really know. With me and Perry, sometimes just being there for each other is all we can do. From thousands of miles away.

But he’d taken care of me when I was little, and I knew that meant I needed to do what I could to make sure someone was taking care of him because it sure and shooting wasn’t going to be me out there. For both of us, it couldn’t be me.

And even though it was Easter in just over a week, and work needed me, Abby from my department was happy to goldfish-sit for a weekend when I took two personal days and went back to Pittsburgh on Thursday. I go back to Pittsburgh even less often than I talk to Perry. But even when I don’t want to do it, even when I feel like I’m doing it out of obligation, sometimes it helps. Like talking to Perry. Even when I have to get up at five so I can get to Pittsburgh on a day that doesn’t mean anything to me or my parents. When I go see them, it’s important that I do it on days that don’t mean much of anything.

What I do when I see them is something Mom gave up on and Dad never did, and it’s something I shouldn’t do because it’s not a thing for Christians. But I do it anyway. It’s one of the only things I grew up with that I kept with me. Mom and Dad are gone, I don’t tell Perry, and the graves get cleaned anyway. It still means something to me when I leave stones on my parents’ graves. I don’t go to the cemetery to talk to my parents, or to be mad at them, or forgive them. What they did isn’t something I can forgive. But I’m learning to live in peace with it. It helps me to know I came here, and left, and that I left something behind to say I’ve come and gone.

Grandma told us flowers fade, but stone holds memory. I don’t pretend I’m leaving memories behind. But each time I see my parents and leave some stones, it gets easier to carry my life.

Sometimes I think about my mother and how she shouldn’t have married my father, and how my father shouldn’t have had to marry her, but how they’d both be ruined if they hadn’t. Both of them made mistakes when they were young – when they were more children than Perry and I ever got to be. I like to think maybe there’d been love between my parents once, and I always wonder where it might have gone. 

I didn’t need to be back at work until Monday, so Friday night I fucked a beautiful woman in my hotel room and cuddled with her for most of Saturday before driving home that evening. Maybe someday I’ll be able to arrive home to a girlfriend, but for now I was happy with some goldfish glad to see me and a promising answering machine message from Jordan.


	27. Fascist architecture of my own design

_There’s something I’d like to suggest, but I need you to listen._

_Okay._

_I need you to not get angry, and I need you to remember we’re both doctors, and I need you to remember you’re my patient and I’m concerned about your well-being. I’m not upset or mad, I’m not disappointed, but I am worried._

_About me?_

_Yes, about you._

_So what is it?_

_I’d like to see about prescribing –_

_I’m not stopping breastfeeding._

_Excuse me?_

_I don’t know if what you have in mind would be safe for me to take while I’m breastfeeding Jack. So whatever medication you’re thinking of, that would be a deal-breaker if that was what I’d have to do to take them. As your patient._

_You’d refuse treatment?_

_If that’s what I’d have to do to not endanger Jack. I know I’d tell patients of mine – I would have told patients, stop breastfeeding because it’s you that you need to worry about, not your child; they can eat on their own just fine. But…please, this…_

_One of the many reasons the Matthias Study even exists is so we can make a legitimate push for more research into exactly those concerns._

_As a breastfeeding mother, I appreciate it._

_As your doctor, I’d discuss the possible options with you beforehand to address your worries about the different courses of treatment for your depression._

_Which is exactly what any good doctor should do if the patient is afraid of what might happen to them if they decide to pursue one treatment or another._

_I don’t think you’ve ever called me a good doctor before._

_You are, but don’t let it go to your head. I’m not…I’m not saying no, and I’m not saying yes. I’m saying yes what you’ve brought up is a good, solid idea, and no, I don’t want to get started on it right away. What I’m saying is, I need a little time to think about it._

_Would a week do it?_

_I don’t know. Do you have someone I could talk to about it?_

_Yes. Me._

_No, I – if you’re prescribing them, if we’re already talking, wouldn’t there be some conflict of interest or something like that? I don’t want to talk to you about it if it’s like this._

_If what’s like this? If you think my opinion of you matters and you’re also worried about saying no to me and having to switch doctors? You don’t need to protect me from thinking poorly of you, and you don’t have to protect yourself from me thinking badly of you. I know that’s one of your standard coping mechanisms, but that’s not the case in here. I’m sure this has happened to you before, and I’d be surprised to find a doctor that’s been practicing for more than two days who hasn’t had it happen to them. But you don’t need to worry about me liking you or you liking me._

_Because we’re not friends._

_We aren’t. If we met on the street, we’d never talk to each other, and if the Study didn’t exist, we probably wouldn’t know about each other. You and I aren’t friends. I doubt we ever would have been. That doesn’t mean I’m not worried for you, for your son, for your general well-being, and that doesn’t mean I’m not going to act on it to see you better and healthier and happier. If you’re serious about considering medication, I can get a list together and we can talk about it next week. Does that work for you?_

_Yes. That, thank you. That works for me._

*

Jordan checked her watch, took another drink of iced coffee, and was glad all over again that she’d parked in the shade. Mid-April parking lot temperatures weren’t that bad, but it wouldn’t have been pretty if she’d had to wait out in the full sun. That, and the shade made for good cover, even though Perry kept his schedule rigorously enough she thankfully wasn’t waiting for long. It was almost enough to feel like a slow seventies spy movie, even if the rest of her life was a late-nineties sci-fi drama.

Jordan knew Perry didn’t break his weekly appointment with the Study’s shrink for anything – he’d bragged about meeting her in his maternity suite the day after giving birth, loopy on painkillers and sleep deprivation and still aware enough to bare his soul to her – and as far as Jordan was concerned, that was a good thing. The moment he was in the taxi and heading off, she was out of her car and off to his apartment with a quick detour to the super’s office for a moving cart. She’d asked her friends for make and model suggestions, buying strategies and tips, and Kath had offered the advice to call salesmen on their bluffs – that if they said it was easy to assemble, ask them to do it right then and there.

The looks on the salesmen’s and salesboy’s faces at that request _would_ have been entertaining if Jordan had been in the mood. She’d ended up putting down almost three hundred dollars for the one model that fit the look of Jack’s other furniture well enough, solid construction and softly colored fabric, and it was total coincidence that it came from the one store where nobody gave her any bullshit about being a good parent, much less a good mother.

It felt like a waste of her economics degree to have to resort to furniture assembly, even if she did almost match the salesgirl’s time.

But still, when she was done and the bedroom rearranged, waiting for Perry was only a matter of making herself a cup of tea and sitting herself down in the living room. Jordan tried not to count the minutes and focus on the aroma and feel of the rising steam, the color of the water as the tea steeped, the warmth of it as she wrapped her hands around the mug. When she closed her eyes, all she smelled was the memory of summer parties at Patricia’s house, towels spread out over the overgrown backyard lawn on hot afternoons and the scent of the grass that always clung to her bare skin for hours after she’d left. It was completely possible Perry was doing some errands, or that he had some actual medical checkups that needed to get done, or the doctors needed to coo over Jack some more.

Jordan almost turned on the TV, but settled for the childcare manual sitting on top of the pile in the bedroom as a way to pass the time. She flipped back and forth and ended up on the chapter about older infants, and was halfway through the section on how to plan playdates when Perry unlocked the front door, sighed and tossed the keys down on the table

“I can’t say I’m all that impressed by this.” He did a double-take as she sat up and got a good look at Jack wrapped tight to Perry’s chest in a very attachment-parenting style device, and she forced her eyes up to Perry’s face. “You’d think America’s leading etiquette experts would have _something_ to say about when the father and mother both work.”

“Jordan, what in the name of –”

“Then again, maybe they’re writing for a different crowd than the two of us. But that just makes me wonder what the baby books for your and Jack’s sort of situation look like.” The image of a garish cover flitted into her mind and slid out just as fast, and she set the book down before crossing her arms over her chest. “Scratch that, I don’t want to know.”

“What are you doing here?”

“First you don’t care if I leave, now you’re concerned that I’m here. It’ll do us both a world of good if you make up your mind about it. How’s Jack doing?”

“He’s – he’s fine. But I don’t recall having any say in your decision to walk out of here the other night. In fact, I don’t recall having any say in _any_ decision of yours to stay or go whenever you want to wherever you want. But the fact that you did leave means seeing you back here doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.”

“Look, if you don’t want me here, I’m willing to live with that as long as you have the guts to admit to it. I’ll get the last of my stuff and leave. Just say the word.”

“Just say it. Just like that?” Jordan nodded. “And what word might that be?”

“I’m sure you can figure something out.” She left for the kitchen to make some coffee. Perry wasn’t right behind her, but followed some minutes later with Jack gone from his person as the pot gurgled and the machine hummed.

“What the hell is that thing in the bedroom?”

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific than that.”

“If you could _please_ not draw me into –”

“It was the only one in the store that I knew would be up to your set of exacting standards.”

“I’m sure it is, and while I’d ordinarily appreciate that, I’m still at a loss for why it’s here to begin with.”

“Because I want half the bed, not a third of it. I can share a room with a crying baby, but only if I don’t have to share the bed. I don’t know if I can apologize for the other night – and yes,” she held up a hand as Perry opened his mouth, “it’s _both_ because we both know I’m incapable of admitting personal wrongdoings if the other parties involved can accept any fraction of the blame _and_ because I don’t think what I did was totally in the wrong, but I’m not here to apologize.” Jordan took a deep breath of the coffee’s fragrance mingling through the kitchen. “I’m not here for you to apologize to me, either.”

“Keeping our heads down and pretending we can keep going on like nothing’s happened didn’t work the last time we tried it.”

“I know.”

“So what are you here for, then? Besides to drop off what I’m willing to grant is a very nice gift.”

“I’m here because I don’t want to be somewhere you’re not.”

“And you’re willing to accept Jack along with that.”

“Pretty much.”

“What a load of crap,” he laughed. “What a mondo load of crap. You like feeling good about yourself even if it’s your fault, you don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not you can apologize because you know you’ll never –”

“I’m sorry.” It was worth it to break her pride to see the look on Perry’s face. “There. Okay? Happy? No, wait, don’t care if you’re happy. But I said it. Didn’t want to. Don’t think I’ll say it again. But I said it.” He nodded, tapping his nose as he crossed his arms over his chest. She had no idea what it looked like right now. “It’s the saying it that’s the important part, right?”

“It can be.”

“You ready to say it?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath over it.”

“Just assume you’re never going to say much of anything and move on with my life? Way ahead of you.” She poured two mugs of steaming, happy-making coffee. “How are you doing, though?”

“Honestly, I’m getting tired of answering that question.”

“If you don’t want to talk about your feelings with me, good. I’m really not cut out for the feelings business. But the doctor the Study has you talking to – Flanagan, Callahan –”

“Hanrahan.”

“Sure, fine, don’t actually care about that. I’m just happy you’ve got someone to unload onto that isn’t me.” Dark and sweet and just bitter enough, the coffee went down smooth, and they drank in good adult silence. When he was done with his coffee, Perry went to check on Jack, and a couple of hours later, having read through most of a short story collection wedged in between parenting guides, Jordan took it upon herself to make dinner. There was enough stuff in Perry’s kitchen it wouldn’t be a continuation of his bland third trimester diet: even if the cans in the back of the cupboard were a little dusty, the tomatoes inside of them were just fine.

She hadn’t gotten rid of her stuff around the house, and Perry hadn’t thrown anything out or set it on fire, so her pajamas were where she’d last left them – folded in the bottom drawer from the last round of laundry and still smelling like artificial meadow breezes. After taking a moment to savor the scent, she put them right back where she’d found them. By the time Perry got out of the shower and joined her in the bedroom, she’d set her trap as best she could, going so far as to bait it with herself, but the sight of him in blue pajamas that went all the way to his ankles and wrists, plus Jack in his arms, told Jordan she had her work cut out for her.

“Please tell me he’s eaten dinner.”

“Drained both sides empty.” He smiled for real for a moment and looked from Jordan lying on the bed to the bassinet lurking just beside it. She nodded, spreading herself out just a little bit more, enough to tell him what was at stake. If it went badly, she’d have dug her own grave, and she could just imagine Perry tossing her a shovel and pointing at an empty funeral plot. But she had a feeling it would go the way she wanted. 

She knew she shouldn’t have doubted herself as Perry lay Jack down in the bassinet. 

“There you go, puppy, right there. I’m here if you need me, I’m right here, not even leaving the room.” He stroked Jack’s head. “Right here if you need me, the big bed’s here if you need it, but someone got you this little one all for yourself if you don’t want to share. I don’t know why the crazy lady who sometimes calls herself your mommy thought it’d be nice, but she hopes you like it. You need me for anything just let me know. I’m here. Love you, Jack.” He bent down and kissed Jack’s head as he slept on, then straightened up to look at his baby just a little longer before finally getting into bed, lowering himself down with something close to the noises and level of care he’d had when he’d been nine months pregnant, without even the excuse of gestating someone. Perry turned and looked at her, almost like he was surprised she hadn’t left.

She didn’t say anything and started kissing him.

He kissed her back and whispered, “Wait, Jordan, wait a minute.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered back, “it’s all okay.”

“No, no, Jordan, stop.”

“You want to?” She pulled away, looking down at him. “You want to stop?”

“I…” Perry stared up at her, his face so beautifully confused. She put her hand to his cheek, and he shivered; she leaned back down over him, and he shuddered. He shook his head. “Please…”

“It’s okay.” He closed his eyes and put his hand over hers, pressing it close. She could feel the warmth of his cheek and how smooth his palm was. But doctors always took good care of their hands. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.” If Jordan was a lesser woman, she’d have mocked him for the hitch in his breath, for the near-sob, the almost-cry, the close-to-weeping. But she was a bigger person than that. 

“Please.” He swallowed. “Yes.”

“Good.” She slid her hand out from under his to sit back up and pull off her top. Perry blinked at her like he didn’t know what he was looking at. She tried kissing the look away, but it stayed. “It’s all right, Perry.” She reached for the top button on his pajamas, and his hands closed over hers.

“Please don’t.”

“It’s all right.”

“Jordan, please, it’s not something you want to see.”

She shook her head. “I do.” She didn’t, but she wanted to have sex with Perry with his pajamas on even less. “I do, Perry.” He didn’t look like he believed her or that he wanted to be there. Jordan didn’t recognize his expression, not until she realized it was _fear_.

Of all the stupid things he had to do, he had to be afraid.

“It’s all right,” she whispered, as much for herself as for him, reaching down and pulling his hands up to rest on her breasts, and that helped. He always knew what felt good, nice deep pressure she could feel underneath the work done, and it kept him busy, it kept him in the moment, it got her a second to get her bearings back. She sat up onto her knees, letting his hands fall away, then wiggled out of her panties and got into a position she didn’t quite want to be in, with her naked and him still wearing everything. But she could fix that. She could reach up underneath his pajamas and feel him flinch, and when he froze, she got exactly how much he didn’t want her looking at him naked, and there was only so much she could do to keep him from grabbing the baby and leaving the room.

Except keeping her hand right where it was, looking him in the eye, and focusing on staying still. She could put all her energy into not flinching and holding eye contact and not saying a goddamn word as she leaned over and turned off the light.

“That help?” she asked.

“Thank you.”

“If this is how we’re having sex from now on, let me know, because I’d hate to waste good underwear on sex if you aren’t even going to see it.” She began unbuttoning his pajama top as he lay there, refusing to help or participate. As she moved up from the bottom, her hands brushed over his chest, just briefly, just enough to feel how soft it was. When she was finished, she began pushing the pajama top off his shoulders, and he grunted as he sat up to pull it the rest of the way, and then they were both sitting up in bed, close enough to see each other’s eyes in the dim, ambient light coming through the window.

She didn’t look away, just kissed him. He kissed her back. She moaned, softly, when she felt his hands on the side of her face, his palms soft and warm. There wasn’t anything under his pajama top she’d wanted to see. But she needed to know he was here with her, and she couldn’t do that unless she could feel his skin. Really feel his skin, on as much of her own as possible. Sometimes she just wanted a fuck, sometimes she wanted to screw. Right now she needed a conversation.

“Hey,” he whispered as she tossed the condom wrapper aside, “how crazy would it be if we messed up and _you_ got pregnant?”

“Don’t you even _joke_ about that,” she said, laughing quietly. “It’s not funny.”

“How horrible would it be for that kid? Mommy’s your mother and your brother’s father, dad’s also a mother sometimes, they decided to trade off?”

“Aren’t there other couples where the kid from the Study wasn’t the first?”

“A few, yeah. Oh, god, those poor kids. Oh, dear god those poor firstborn children.”

“Pretty messed up, but at least they’d have someone to talk to about it.” She rolled the condom onto his dick, held it steady and slid down, sighing and shifting her hips until she was bottomed out on top of him. “Don’t wake the baby.”

“Wasn’t going to,” he said, and she could just about see him fist the blankets before he thrust up.

It wasn’t like having sex when he’d been nine months pregnant. Face-to-face, for one, and him being able to sit up and kiss her and run his hands through his hair was new all over again. Having to stay quiet because the baby was _over_ _there,_ not _right here –_ and there was always a baby in the room when they screwed nowadays, no getting around it – was almost too scary to think about.

He thrust into her gently, short little movements as he hissed in what she guessed was pain and hoped was pleasure. She moved with him, quiet, clenching around him and wrapping her arms around his neck to pull him close to hear him gasp right to her ear. He was soft against her chest, softer than he’d ever been; his arms were still strong and his back was still solid, but where the two of them were pressed together in front, he was so much softer. Loose, not just soft. She kissed him and pressed their cheeks together. Everything she wanted to say to him was in how she fucked him. He fucked her just as gentle right back, and her breath caught in his mouth when he whispered he was sorry.

When she came, it wasn’t the worst she’d ever had.

Jordan fell asleep right after the clean-up, a quick shower and getting her pajamas on and back into bed. It was too late to want to keep staying up. She would’ve slept through the night, except something almost like a distant siren broke her dream, and by the time it was gone she was awake enough she knew she couldn’t fall back to sleep right away. It took her a few minutes to get the strength to want to move, and when she did, rolling over in bed to try to get comfortable, she realized she should’ve put it together around the same time she’d bought the bassinet. Jack wasn’t yet old enough to sleep through the night.

That, and Perry had decided he’d never have his kid on a bottle.

He wasn’t whispering to him as he ate; there was at least that. Perry was propped up against the headboard, Jack in one arm and a pillow held tight against his belly with the other. He was looking at Jack with more tenderness than he’d ever looked at Jordan, and she figured that was fair. She watched Jack eat, his feet kicking and his hands clasping. This was what Perry had wanted. Back when he’d asked her for an egg, this was what he’d planned. Even if she hadn’t been here, she would have been a part of this. She’d never thought she would, but she was, now. She was always going to be part of this. She was always going to be a parent. Not just any parent, but one of Jack’s. She was always going to be one of Jack’s parents. His father. She was always going to be his father.

“You would have liked my dad.” The words fell out of her mouth like she’d dropped them on the floor. Perry turned to look at her and slowly gave her a little smile.

“I think I would have.” He went back to watching Jack nurse and when he was done, excused the both of them to Jack’s nursery for a diaper change. Jordan waited, and it almost felt nice to see both of them return. Perry lay Jack back down in the bassinet without the same vocal production, but still with a kiss. When their son was settled, he began buttoning his pajama top while facing her. He could have retreated to get dressed in the bathroom, and Jordan knew he hadn’t on purpose. She watched him shamelessly and curiously, even though the amount of ambient light meant she couldn’t see much.

He sighed as he got under the covers, arranging himself gently. 

Jordan waited until he was settled in to say, “I’d like him to have a decent relationship with his last surviving grandparent.”

“I’m not going to be the one to introduce them. Yeah, hey, surprise miracle of mad science grandkid, sorry I didn’t tell you about him earlier.”

“Given the circumstances, I think she might understand.”


	28. Yo, we was talking earlier and I was telling you talking ’bout life

_It feels like I’ll be giving him up. I know it isn’t, believe me I do. I can’t have him on me all the time during rounds, seeing patients – they’re sick, he’s a baby, that alone means it’s not a good idea. I need to maintain a certain persona among the interns and residents, and it’s hard to do that with a baby strapped to my chest. But besides that, it’s that I know this is for the best. It’ll mean I can feed him when he needs to eat and then go two floors up and get back to work, the nurses in pediatrics all know what they’re doing when it comes to infant care, but…_

_Every mother feels that._

_I know. Even the other mothers in the Study?_

_Even them._

_Yeah, I figured._

_But you wanted the reassurance._

_I did. I keep thinking, is two months okay, should I wait longer, I can wait at least ten weeks, it wouldn’t be hard to get that arranged. And I know that’s me trying to find ways to talk myself out of it._

_And I’m very proud of you for recognizing that._

*

As he explained, Cox wanted his return to Sacred Heart to be a low-key affair, something without any fanfare, celebrations, or parties. Not even any cake. He wasn’t even coming back to work just yet, not when he was still off on maternity leave. When he returned, it was going to be a quiet non-event, but he still needed to come in to see HR and the hospital’s childcare facilities firsthand in order to deal with the paperwork and assess them himself before getting back to his job.

“It’s going to be on the second, and I’m letting you know beforehand so you can run interference for me. I don’t need Newbie finding out and bringing me a sheet cake reading ‘Here’s To The Fruit Of Your Loins’ or something equally inane. So please, as a _friend_ , yes, Carla, I need this from you.”

“I’m honored you’re considering me,” Carla said, twirling a curl around a finger.

“There’s nobody else I can trustwith this. _Yes_ , that includes Jordan.”

“Remind me why the two of you decided to get back together.”

“It’s important to provide a child with a stable family unit in their first few years for healthy emotional development.”

Carla remembered how he’d come back to work after he’d divorced Jordan, how he’d treated it like he’d been away on a vacation. Nothing important to focus on or talk about, not even with friends – he’d had a couple more at that point, people that hadn’t gotten to know him yet. They’d asked, she’d asked, and he’d given vacation-type answers, things to get people to stop asking. In his defense, everyone and their sister had known what went down, and in the end, he’d only been gone for a week. This time around, after seven weeks on top of the whole _giving birth_ thing, she had no idea what he’d say now to get people to stop.

Busy with her own patients and keeping JD occupied, piling him with work that needed to get done, she didn’t see Cox when he came in,. Everyone else she soothed with misinformation, giving them a different date or saying she didn’t know _exactly_ when he might be arriving – and that, at least, was honest enough, since he’d just told her _sometime in the morning_. Speculation ran wild, guesses roamed the hallways, and while Carla had no trouble imaging all sorts of scenarios for Cox to announce his arrival back in the hospital, from leading a marching band and ticker-tape parade to some sort of gymnastics routine down the halls, she knew it’d just be him showing up.

It always felt good to be right.

“Hi, Carla.”

She hadn’t expected him to go for any baby-wearing, and that alone was enough to take the words out of her mouth. But there was his son, swaddled and wrapped up in a lovely blue sling and resting his head against Cox’s chest – and there was her friend, looking tired and happy, and she was glad to see him. Laverne stared, Derek blinked, Barbara just stood there, and Cox pointed, “Is that room free?”

“Totally empty,” Carla said.

“Good. Now, if the rest of you will please excuse us.” She followed him into the just-vacated room and he closed the door, set down the diaper bag, and turned to face her.

“Listen, I’ve got maybe ten minutes before he wants another meal and five before Jordan gets bored tormenting Newbie and he escapes back up here, so I’ll keep this brief and say hello, and I’m sure Jack would say hello if he could speak and knew who you were, so – Carla, this is Jack, my son and baby number seven born to the Matthias Study.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said to Jack.

“I’m sure he’d say the same if he could.”

“I can wait for him to learn to talk. But right now, it’s good to see you, too.”

“Thanks. And it’s nice to get back in for a while – anything been going on I should know about? Jordan’s been feeding me gossip, but that’s not really ground-level news.”

“Whatever’s happened here is nothing next to that baby you’ve got.”

“Fair point.”

“So when are you coming back to work? Assuming the facilities we’ve got downstairs meet your standards.”

“They do, barely, and sometime later this month.”

“When?”

“A workday. What’s got you smiling?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, looking up at her friend’s happy face. “Just thinking about the lengths you’ll go to keep things secret when they don’t have to be.”

“Carla, I’d much rather not get into an explanation of why my situation is one where caution is perfectly justified and how I’d like to protect what little privacy I have left and sustain some feeling of control over my life. So can we simply take it for granted that keeping _exactly_ when I’m coming back to work a secret allows for all of that and more?”

“It’ll be like you never left.” That got a smile out of him. “Still no hugs, right?”

“For you, I’ll allow a gentle pat on the shoulder.”

“I’d think being a mother would’ve softened you some.”

“And you thought wrong.” He didn’t flinch and she didn’t press her luck, stepping away after two.

“Is there any way the answer would be something besides no if I ask to hold him?”

“I suppose you could hold him if I’ve perished in a fiery crash and you’re pulling him out of the burning wreckage. It’s possible, if I’m the one running into the burning wreckage to save someone and Jordan’s nowhere in sight. Or I suppose I might let you hold him to make Newbie’s head explode. And since he’s not around…”

“He’ll be back before you know it.” Carla crossed her arms and smirked. Jack responded by blinking and working his jaw.

“Let me have this moment of peace and quiet, thank you. I know he’ll be back, there’s no getting away from him, but just taking a moment to appreciate – oh.”

“Oh, what?”

“Jack’s decided it’s lunchtime.” He was starting to root around as best he could, fist clutching at the sling’s fabric and not getting a grip. Cox looked around the room, shrugged, and looked at her with naked desperation. “If you could?”

“It’s nice to see you, too,” Carla tossed over her shoulder as she left, giving him the privacy he needed to feed his son, and getting everyone’s eyes on her, dissecting and devouring. She knew everyone was waiting for her to say something, and she knew Cox needed her to not say anything. So she aimed for somewhere in the middle.

“Cute baby he’s got,” she said, smiling wide.

That did the trick, and she was able to get back to work, getting through half a chart before Elliot stopped by.

“Was Cox up here? I heard he was in today, and it’s not that I really want to see him, I just want to _know_ he’s here and maybe offer some congratulations, but I figured if anyone would know –”

“Yeah, he’s in there,” Carla said, trying to focus on deciphering Mickhead’s handwriting. A moment passed before she realized and shouted, “No, wait!” at the same time Elliot shrieked and sprinted out of the room, slamming the door behind her with a look of utter horror on her face.

“Something wrong?” Laverne asked. Elliot just whimpered. Laverne, Carla, Derek, and Barbara looked at each other, shrugged, and went back to work. Elliot was still whimpering a full chart later, when JD arrived, Turk right behind him.

“Hey, we heard Cox was back! If he’s here, tell him we’re sorry, we’d have been by sooner, but there was this –”

“He is, he’s here, but you can’t see him yet,” Carla said.

“Why not?”

“Ask her,” Derek said.

“What? Elliot got to see Cox already? Where is he?”

“It was horrible,” Elliot said. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

“What happened?” Turk asked.

“I’m going to have nightmares about it. I just know it. I’ve never – I’ll never get that out of my head. I’m too horrified to be angry Carla didn’t warn me in time. But you really should have warned me.”

“Probably, yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Thanks.”

“What was it?” JD pressed. “What did she see? What’d you see?”

“She saw Cox feeding his son.”

“She what? He’s what? Where is –”

“Turk, grab him!”

“Hey!”

“Sorry, JD, but Cox asked me a favor to not let him be disturbed and you know how babies get when they have their meals interrupted! Elliot freaking out probably threw him off.”

“All right, I’ll admit the baby doesn’t need any distractions,” JD said, pinned to the floor beneath Turk, “but could you let me up when he comes out?”

“Deal,” Turk said, sitting on top of his best friend’s backside. “But was it really that bad?”

“Turk, he was _feeding a baby_. He was _breastfeeding_.”

“He was _what?”_ JD shouted.

“And the problem with that is?” Laverne asked.

“Breastfeeding,” Elliot hissed.

“You’re kidding me he was doing that!”

“That’s what breasts are for, Elliot,” Carla said. “They feed babies.”

“No! No, they’re not! Okay, they are, but they were, I mean, that’s what they _used_ to be used for, but not anymore!”

“So it wasn’t the man-tits part of it?” Turk asked.

“Let me up, I need to see it happening!”

“Nothing doing.”

“Dammit.”

“That kid was just gulping it down,” Elliot said, her thousand-yard stare cut short by the wall.

“He’s probably already done by now,” Derek offered.

“I might not have anything polite t’say about how this particular baby came into the world, but since he’s here now, I’ll just say it’s good for a baby to be fed by his mother,” Laverne said.

“I don’t think I’d be shy about functioning breasts if I had them,” JD said, propping his chin in his hands. “I’d just go ahead and use them right out here.”

“Right, because that’s every man’s dream! Your own set of boobies, right there for you to use, well, whoop-dee-frickin’-doo!” Elliot jumped up to look down at JD and Turk, her hands waving through the air. “I know you’d think it’d be fun and great to have a pair, but trust me, they get in the way of everything, you always spill on them, you can forget about finding a decent formal top that’ll manage to keep them warm _and_ not keep showing off the bra that was supposed to be for the boyfriend’s eyes only because you didn’t account for the corsage’s weight when you practiced the dance steps at home in the mirror, but sure, good for Cox now that he’s gotten a pair of his own!” Facing away from the door, she couldn’t see Cox walk up to stand just behind her. “Let’s all just cheer for Doctor Babymama Cox, him and his perfect boobs!”

“Well, my son’s a big fan,” Cox said, smiling when Elliot froze and slowly turned around to whimper to his face. Turk jumped to his feet and JD followed, rubbing his ass. Cox went on, still grinning that shark grin, “If that’s _really_ all it takes to get you to leave me alone, I’ll be nursing this kid ’till he’s forty. And Carla, I do appreciate you letting my son get dinner and a show, and I’m especially glad for the absolutely note-perfect introduction for what he’s got to expect from everyone here, so everyone, yes, this is my son that I gestated for thirty-eight weeks. Yes, you can come closer and take a look, yes, that’s close enough, no, you can’t hold him, no, you can’t pinch his cheeks, and no, he won’t be hanging around strapped to my back or swaddled to my front when I’m up here working. He’ll be in the daycare in pediatrics, and if you think for a single moment that you can get away with sneaking down there and holding him when I’m busy here in rounds, _Newbie_ , rest assured the news _will_ get back to me and I _will_ see to it you suffer viscerally and creatively for even attempting to try and get away with it. His name’s Jack. He is, if not happy to meet you, certainly glad to get the introductions over with.”

“I feel the same way,” Turk said.

“Well, I’m happy to meet him,” JD said. Clearly entranced at something inside his head, he stared at Jack for a moment and took a step closer, stopping when Cox growled, but still smiling. “Hey there, you little handsome Jackie-boy,” he said in a higher-pitched sing-song, “hey there, hey there, it’s good to meet you, yes it is, yes it is. I’m JD and I’m so so so happy to meet you today, yes I am, yes I am, yes I am.” 

“Caroline, could you just talk to him like a person instead of a springer spaniel you find particularly adorable?”

“All the childcare books I’ve read say you’re supposed to do the baby talk voice because it makes it easier for infants to distinguish words and learn language. Hey, _baby_ , hey there, hey.”

Cox rolled his eyes. “Of course you’ve been doing the reading.” He looked around. “Anyone else got anything to say? No?”

“If I can…” Elliot lowered her hand under Cox’s gaze. “I was just wondering…I mean I _know_ what happens in the Matthias Study when the, ah, when the mothers give birth. I read all about the applied research in all the journals, _Heart, Journal of Pediatrics, The Lancet_ , I just…I guess I’m trying to say I know what happens, I mean I’ve been _informed_ , but putting it together, you and your baby, that’s…” He nodded for her to keep talking. “You were pregnant and now –”

“There are times I wish I could say I pushed him out of my crotch, I really do! But I have to settle for, well, having had him forcibly removed like the parasite he was.”

All the blood went from Elliot’s cheeks, and she leaned back to grab the counter of the nurse’s station to stay upright. Cox just smiled.

“Ready to go home, Jack? Ready to go? We’re ready to go. See you soon, everyone.”

“Now that was something,” Laverne said as the doctors left.

“Tell me about it,” Carla sighed.

“Cute baby,” Derek said, half-smiling.

“He is. God help me, he really is. But I meant Doctor Reid’s whole scene about babies eating the way they should by nature. No matter what kind of baby it is, I’m not passing judgment there. But Doctor Reid herself, she oughta know better.”

“White people,” Carla muttered. The whole Matthias Study smacked of white people, top to bottom, but Laverne was right: Elliot’s reaction took the cake, the candles, and the tablecloth.

“Lord, tell me about it,” Laverne laughed. Carla joined in for a moment and trailed off.

Cox wasn’t the first person she knew who took time off to have a baby and then came back to work. He wasn’t the only one who left his baby in the hands of the daycare staff, either. But he was the first one who’d been able to make the decision to leave his baby in the hands of the daycare staff because before he’d gotten pregnant, the hospital hadn’t covered infants in its facilities or had the staff to care for them. It’d been one of those _we can’t afford to save money_ situations until Cox and the full force of the lawyers behind the Matthias Study had forced the board of Sacred Heart to think about what they were going to have to say to him, and then they managed to find the money. And now, more doctors and nurses were working longer hours without worrying about their babies, mothers and fathers were offering to take their kids to the hospital’s daycare with them instead of leaving them at home with their other parent. Everyone who was expecting a child now or eventually knew they’d have something ready for them to keep them from making a stupid choice that wasn’t ever really a choice at all.

Carla knew when she had a baby herself, when it was her chance to be a mother, she’d never have to worry about that.


	29. Lady Madonna, children at your feet

_He was okay. More than okay. Everyone said he was great and everyone loved him. I knew he was an amazing kid, but hearing that, especially after how hard it was to say good-bye that morning, was just…it was such a relief to hear that. I don’t know if I could’ve done it again the next day if I hadn’t heard that._

_You have to get right out of the room._

_He makes it easy. He’s a fast eater. I think he gets that from me. He nursed for fifteen minutes, I changed him, and then I went back to work. Maybe twenty minutes from getting the page to getting back to work, and I know some doctors, I won’t name names, who take bathroom breaks longer than that. As long as he doesn’t want a cluster feeding when I’ve got a patient that needs me to make sure they don’t die right then – I think I can keep going with this._

_That’s what got you smiling._

_It’s not just Jack. Someone I work with, her name’s Kath Maugham, she came up to me and said she was so glad for everything the Study was doing._

_I’m sorry?_

_I was a little surprised, but we talked for almost ten minutes about it. Jordan got that family in the divorce even though I had to keep on working with her, which was genuinely okay – you know me and compartmentalizing – but I guess since Jordan and I are back together, Maugham thinks it’s okay for us to be friends again._

_That sounds like good news._

_Well, she’s a mother too. It’s nice to have that in common to talk about._

*

Cox knew being a doctor was a rare profession where you learned early, hard, and really goddamn well how to focus on exactly what was right in front of you, and any adulation and attention he might have received when he got back to work was cut short the moment someone else needed his help keeping a patient from dying, followed by Wasmuth who’d come in for a check-up, and between one patient and another, he’d slipped back into the inner workings of Sacred Heart like nothing had broken the rhythm. It didn’t even take two days. The second day, Newbie had brought in the largest edible fruit bouquet Cox had ever seen; while he’d been out of practice, and even if speaking through a mouthful of pineapple took away some of the intended fury, the ranting helped reestablish the rhythm of the usual workday. And to Newbie’s credit, it _had_ been good pineapple.

Jack didn’t entirely leave Cox’s mind when he left pediatrics after a feeding, but sometimes it took him several minutes after a code or examination to think about Jack again, once the situation was stabilized or dealt with one way or another and he had a little more room inside his head for something besides the immediate problem of his current patient.

He knew some months ago, he would have felt bad about that. Now he _knew_ he didn’t need to feel that way, saved it as something to discuss with Hanrahan, and talked it out with Jack first. Sometimes Jordan teased him for acting like their son understood everything he said to him, for treating him like a colleague or a drinking buddy, and Cox always played along, pretending to be annoyed. It was easier than explaining why something as small as the sort of baby-talk babble most parents could manage wasn’t something he could ever do.

“No, that’s not a nipple, that’s hair, let go, let go, thank you. Right area, wrong target. While I could mock you for your lack of motor control, I know it’s something you’re working on, and come on, you’re not even six months old, I can’t expect you to grasp a pencil and write out a proper prescription order. That’s just unfair to you. But you’ve got my hands and my shirt if you want to grab something, so please leave what body hair I’ve got alone.” Jack just started shaking his head side to side, unlatching without any prompting. “You’re done? You’ve already finished? No more? All right.” Cox pressed the heel of his free hand against the still-leaking nipple until it got the message mealtime was over, and he kept pushing the glider back-and-forth. “That was good, Jack. That was a real good job there, real good. You put a lot of people in the hospital to shame for just how good you are at eating. Keep it up, you’ll make your parents proud of you.”

He sighed. “You can keep nursing as long as you want, puppy. I’m not going to stop you. You know that, right? You can keep right on nursing for as long as you want.”

But Jack was done for the night, even if it’d already turned over into morning sometime during the feeding. There weren’t any antics during the diaper change, leaving Cox’s clothes free of territorial markings and only one changing table cover ruined for the night, which was quickly thrown into what he and Jordan affectionately referred to as _the hazmat bin_ , their household following proper hospital protocols for biological waste to the letter.

The deal was that Jack slept in their bedroom in the bassinet until he slept through the night every night for a week. After that, even if he demanded cluster feedings at kiss-my-ass-o-clock every morning until he’d weaned, he’d sleep in his bedroom. They weren’t there yet, but since this was only the second night feeding of the week and it was a Thursday, Cox knew that day was coming soon.

In the meantime, he laid Jack down gently and, four hours later, woke him up for a now-routine early morning breakfast. He wasn’t that hungry, which was fine since there wasn’t as much milk as there would’ve been if he hadn’t wanted to eat earlier. Cox managed to get him to nurse on both sides, and the let-down was enough he could express a fair amount afterward. As much as it pained him to see the milk go to waste, and the sheer physical work it took to get milk out of him when he wasn’t feeding Jack, it was still worth the time and effort. 

Because it meant Jordan could handle Jack for the rest of the morning until he got back from running.

One t-shirt two sizes too small, a second t-shirt a little too tight for comfort, and a running shirt one size too _big_ was a little much with the days warming up to high summertime, but he wasn’t ready to let Jordan go ahead with her offer of buying him athletic gear from the women’s section. Layering up did the job of keeping his torso from shaking and jiggling and managed to let him keep the illusion of dignity.

Going out for his first morning run had been a different kind of hard than leaving Jack behind his first day back at work. Not more or less, and that was something he’d spent the first week of morning runs turning over and over, trying to find the right words to attach to his feelings. The idea that he could allow himself private time away from the context of any sort of parental role, as a mother or a dad, and that it wasn’t a _bad_ thing for him to enjoy his morning running.

That, and it’d taken this much time for him to recover from pregnancy and delivery to feel _capable_ of exercising, never mind how long it’d take for him to get back up to his old stamina on weights or cardio. Maybe a few months, maybe longer, depending on how much he pushed himself and what he was now capable of after having Jack. It wasn’t exactly something to look forward to, not as such, or even something to appreciate the process of accomplishing: it was something to do for himself, alone, away from the hospital and his son and Jordan and the rest of his life. A small sliver of his days spent by himself. He didn’t feel like his old self when he went out running because there was too much _feeling_ different in how each foot planted on the ground and how every other stride needed some compensation, the way his balance was off and he couldn’t always tell when he needed to piss and how everything rocked through his body in ways he couldn’t remember it ever doing before. But even with all that, even when he had to rehash his physical fitness with the Study’s doctors – he didn’t have to share this time with anyone. No paperboys this time of day, no garbagemen this day of the week, nobody else voluntarily awake and exercising out-of-doors this early in the morning. It was just him out here, running through the empty early-morning streets. Just him and the crows. One called out and three more answered, and he looked up past the trees lining the short-housed streets to catch sight of them heading east and dispersing, the way they always did in the morning. Every evening, clouds of them always flew back west.

It was nice to have a bit of company.

When he got home, sweaty, sore, unfortunately milky, and dying for a shower, Jack was awake and deeply involved in batting at the little cubes dangling from his floor mobile while Jordan sat nearby, watching him like a hawk – objectively interested but emotionally uninvolved, ready to dive in at the first sign of action but content to stay removed for the time being.

It was a nice sight, and given how much Jordan wanted to directly involve herself with Jack, it was downright heartwarming. Cox didn’t smile at it, just went for a shower without turning on the lights, leaving the door open to let in the light from the bedroom – more than enough to get around, plenty by which to see his silhouette without any chance of catching a glimpse of his body until he was dressed and didn’t have to risk seeing. Which wasn’t even strange, not from what he knew about typical postpartum self-image. Whatever the mother’s gender happened to be. 

If Jordan had board meetings, she drove them in, and if not, she helped get Jack into his car seat and gave him a very dry good-bye kiss. In any case, he took his separation from her with aplomb and grace, and began shamelessly flirting with the daycare nurses the moment he was placed into their arms. Cox always fled the instant he handed Jack away, the better to keep the both of them from feeling any distress over the separation, whether it was a drop-off in the morning or a feeding during the day. Thankfully, at Sacred Heart, there was always someone or something for him to focus his attention onto, from Kelso gleefully refusing to treat him any differently than how he’d done before Cox became a mother to how Newbie always seemed to be lurking around whenever Cox got a page summoning him downstairs to feed Jack. Lucille was always quietly sneaking through the hallways like he could slip into the nursing room and get a front-row seat to what was supposed to be a private experience.

“I’d think you’d know by _now_ that distracting an infant while they’re eating or bothering their mothers while they’re feeding them isn’t going to do either party any favors and would only serve to cement you as the most gigantic pain it’s ever possible to be. Now, Bernice, going by –”

“Okay, I still don’t get how you _literally gave birth_ to a baby that you _breastfeed exclusively, by yourself_ , and yet you somehow keep on managing to call me girls’ names.”

“What’s your hair gel budget per month?”

“I’m actually trying out some manipulator cream right now, but I’m not sure if I like it better than –”

“And there you go.”


	30. Doctors have come from distant cities just to see me

_If it’s the three of us out together, the expectation’s that Jordan’s the one who holds Jack, not me. If I’m holding him, that’s great, it’s wonderful to see a dad so concerned with his child’s welfare, but it’s still something people notice. If Jordan’s got him, nobody gives a damn. I know all the reasons why that is, and I’m not saying anything about them one way or the other, I’m just saying that they’re there. It’s not a problem society has so many expectations that are built on faulty assumptions about the parenting abilities and inherent skills of one gender or another. It’s not wrong that if Jordan holds Jack, people assume they know exactly what they’re seeing and never bother to comment on her or me, just Jack._

_But it still bothers you._

_Is it cheating to have her hold him?_

_Cheating?_

_Okay, maybe not the best choice of words, maybe not cheating, but it feels like – not admitting defeat so much as not even trying to put up a fight._

_What would you be fighting?_

_Do the other mothers do that?_

_I’m sorry?_

_No, I shouldn’t. You probably can’t tell me anyway. If they have their children’s fathers hold the kids when they’re all out in public so it looks like the usually gender-aligned roles are being adhered to because they can’t stomach the thought someone might look at them and put it together._

_You’re right that I can’t repeat what my other patients tell me in confidence._

_And you’re going to say I can just go ask them myself._

_I’m not because I know you won’t consider that as an option._

_But do they ever pretend to be fathers themselves?_

_Some of them were fathers before they became mothers._

_I’m never going to be a father. I don’t mean I’m never going to be my father, and thank god I’m not, I mean I’m never going to be a father. I wouldn’t say I’m okay with people thinking I am, but I can live with it if I have to. I want to know if I should feel guilty about taking the easy way out of avoiding public situations._

_No, you shouldn’t, but if you do you shouldn’t feel guilty about that, either. You feel what you’re feeling._

_But do the other mothers do that?_

_You’re sure you don’t want to ask them yourself._

_If I ever change my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know._

*

Jordan’s afternoon of good old-fashioned alone time had barely started when the phone rang, but she was already in such a good mood it didn’t qualify as a major annoyance. Even if it was her mother – and like she told Perry, she’d get around to telling her eventually – she’d answer, hang up, and get back to the patio and her book.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Yes, hello, this is the Cox household?”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“You must be Jordan.” The man on the other end laughed softly. “I’m Doctor Linus Cadwallader, and I’m calling on behalf of the Matthias –”

“Really! How nice of you to check in like this. Let me see – Jack’s doing fine, he’s still nursing, but Perry doesn’t want to wean him just yet and seems set on sustaining him through breastmilk alone for as long as humanly possible. I know Perry was in to see his shrink yesterday, and I can only guess it was to discuss his extended focus on keeping another human alive through nothing but his own body, but I don’t ask him about his sessions, so I can’t imagine what I can help you with.”

“Well, it’d be what we’re doing now, only in person.”

“What?”

“I know you declined an interview when Perry was pregnant, but would you be open to one now? Whenever would be convenient for you, of course. We’d still appreciate it, and Miss Sullivan, please give me a moment to at least read you the full sales pitch.” The audacity of the request kept Jordan from interrupting. “Especially since it’s not a long one. We’d appreciate your thoughts on your participation and engagement in the Matthias Study and the work we’re doing and your part in it, and anything you might provide would help us a great deal.”

“If you think I’m going to say yes just because there’s a kid involved now, I’m afraid Perry hasn’t done a good job of talking about me.”

“No, I’d say from this conversation he’s done a perfect job of preparing me for you.”

“Has he. Did he say I don’t have _any_ patience whatsoever to people that don’t get to the point and that right now I’m about six seconds away from just hanging up on you?”

“He said it’d be worth it to try because he said, and I’m quoting, _she’s a strong, proud, beautiful woman who effortlessly manages to be a good parent every day, and she still tries harder than just about anyone I know, and yes, I’m including myself because she knows what a happy childhood is supposed to look like and she’s determined to give that to our son_.”

“Perry said that?”

“He said that to me, yes. He also said, and this is another quote, _if she’s the one who comes in, it’ll be her controlling the narrative about what we did in bed together_.” Cadwallader chuckled. “I admit, I’ve talked to some of the mothers and their partners and wives, and not all of it was in confidence – some, not all, so if you’d like to come in and do nothing but swap sex stories…”

“That depends on how many ‘some’ is.”

“I could give you at least three oral sex anecdotes right now off the top of my head that aren’t protected by any confidentiality agreements.” He laughed again. “But I’d much rather do it in person.”

Six days later, Cadwallader was in the lobby to greet her the moment she stepped past all the security into the building. He was shorter than she’d thought from how he’d sounded on the phone, only about as tall as Barbie from Sacred Heart, but he had a coffee in hand for her – “Black, two sugars, yes, I asked Perry” – which took her mind off the paperwork she had to sign for the session.

“What else about me did Perry tell you?”

“That I should respect and fear you more than any other woman alive.”

“Yeah, sounds about right.”

“That you’re a wonderful mom who’s more than happy to let him do all the gestational work, and he appreciates that you don’t feel infringement on your womanhood.”

“I’m well aware I could have a kid with only minimal help, but I’m not quite crazy enough to want to try sharing myself like that.”

“We’re not all crazy mothers here,” he smiled. “Some of us are just the normal screwed-up kind.” The elevator doors dinged open, a little off from the ones at Sacred Heart – the ones Jordan knew best, and on some level, she always expected hospital elevators to sound like them. “My office is right down here.” The hallway didn’t look much like the office hallways back at Sacred Heart, either: they looked exactly like college building hallways. With plenty of linoleum and lots of pastels, they fit the aesthetic of the building’s exterior perfectly. At least they’d gotten rid of the fluorescent lights in favor of something a little less prone to flickering.

Cadwallader’s office was small, reasonably cozy with a fifth-floor view out over the rest of the campus, a lot of short little buildings tucked into trees with the water tower looming off in the distance. “Take a seat.” He gestured to the sofa.

“Give me a minute to finish this.” She held up the half-full mug. He nodded and crossed his arms as he stood, and Jordan didn’t even wait out the clock with dainty little sips, but downed it in three big gulps. Cadwallader put the mug aside on the windowsill and she finally sat.

“I already asked Perry what he usually goes over in these things,” she leaned forward just as he opened his mouth, “and I know he’s muzzled by all the confidentiality laws and his own personal vendetta against sharing his feelings, _and_ I know you’re not the doctor he usually talks to, whatever her name is, Monaghan? Nah, doesn’t matter. You’re not her, anyway, but he told me about the questions you tend to ask in these things, so – yes, I love Jack, no, I don’t feel bad I didn’t gestate him, yes, Perry did whimper whenever we managed to –”

“No, you don’t.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s more you don’t know what you’re going on about, and that Perry was absolutely right about you needing to be in control over every situation possible for you. But I was talking specifically about your feelings towards Jack.”

“You think I don’t love my son?” He nodded. “Thank God you said that because otherwise I never would have ever imagined or realized just what a cold, senseless bitch I am, to not care about someone who I never had any plans to have feelings for in the first place and that I’ve managed to come to _resent_ for the expectations placed on me just for his existing. I mean that.”

“If you think it’d be fun to do this sort of posturing with a professional instead of a friend of yours, my going rate’s two hundred an hour, plus expenses, and I expect a tip for good service.” She blinked, and he smiled. “The coffee.”

“Right.”

“It’s fine if you don’t care about Jack as much as you think you should. We can talk about that if you want to, but we’re not here for a psychotherapy session. Which you wouldn’t have been doing a good job of steering if this was one. It _could_ be that sort of session, if that’s what you want. What I want right now, if it’s okay with you, is for the two of us to talk about you and your relationships with your son and Perry. Doing whatever you like.”

“You got all that about me and Jack just now.”

“Mostly from our earlier conversation, but yes, pretty much.”

“So you’d really go ahead and let me tell embarrassing stories about Perry and I having sex in his third trimester for an hour if I wanted?” Jordan leaned forward. “Seriously?”

“Deadly.”

“Knowing you’ll just sit back and listen takes the fun out of it.” She leaned back and glared out the window. “And you’d probably be happy about it because you’d cross-reference the stories to get information on cardiovascular capabilities and heart rates and the nervous system and all that jazz.” Cadwallader smiled and shrugged in agreement. “Is there anything you guys don’t use?”

“No, we butcher and preserve every part of the animal.”

“You know Perry would like that. Does he ever talk to you?”

“We’ve spoken a few times.”

“You aren’t missing much. Anything you need you can get from what’s-her-name he talks to.”

“Like I’ve said, we’re not here to talk about Perry. I wanted to talk to you about yourself.”

“What about myself?”

“Well, I’m sure you can guess.” Jordan looked around the room, at the framed photos on the desk, the shelves of books and journals, the stacks of papers, the trees outside. Cadwallader sighed and continued, “Perry also told me –”

“I do like Jack, and I like how happy he makes Perry. But it doesn’t make me happy just to see him. It’s not enough for him to just be right there. It’s enough for Perry, which, good for Perry. I want – okay. There’s this look Perry gets when he feeds Jack that makes me uncomfortable. He’s never _hiding_ anything when he feeds Jack. It’s not something I want to tease him about even though I know I _could_.” He nodded for her to keep going. “Do you have kids?”

“Yeah, two girls. Twelve and fourteen.”

“So you’d know – there’s this other guy I talked to. He’s also in the Study, so it’s fine. We talked about me being a father, and how it’s fine if I don’t feel any big rush of love for the kid right away because fathers _don’t_ necessarily feel that, but that just makes me think of all the lesbian couples out there where one’s the baby’s gestational mother and the other isn’t, and how they never seem to struggle with anything, and how even with straight couples with the usual gender for the parents, it’s not a given that the mother’s going to feel love for her kid right away. If Perry hadn’t wanted me involved in Jack’s life, I know I wouldn’t be feeling this at all.” She sighed. “It’s not that I dislike Jack. I don’t dislike him. I like him fine. It’s that I don’t want to feel bad for what I _do_ feel for him.”

“Now that I understand.” Cadwallader shook his head. “Trust me, I know what it’s like to have mixed feelings about your children.”

“Okay, so you know what I’m talking about here. That’s good for the Study, right? Getting this perspective on kids from men and women no matter who the mother or father is.” He nodded and gestured for her to keep talking. “What did _you_ say when people asked you about why you didn’t love your kids right away?”

“No, I loved my daughters right away. But I hated them at the same time, too. Don’t worry. The hate went away after a while.”

“My guess is you didn’t tell them about the hating.”

“No, I did. They’ve managed to get over it.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Not that badly. It took a lot of family therapy, divorcing their father, and getting some distance from them, but it’s not so bad now. They still call me Mom.” He laughed to himself. “I admit, I’ve gotten to like it. It’s easier being their parent now. I don’t regret being their mother, or transitioning so late in my life. But things as they are right now, after everything it took for my family to get where it is, it’s easier for all of us to live with each other.” Cadwallader didn’t smile. “So I can’t say I know exactly what you or Perry or any of the other Study’s mothers and fathers are going through, but trust me when I tell you I can understand having a difficult relationship with your own child.”

Of all the things he could have said to put her at ease with talking to him, that particular item wouldn’t have made it into the fifty most likely things she would have guessed. But it helped, enough that when the session was done and she had some time before she needed to be back home, she stayed on campus instead of leaving immediately. Talking to therapists, or even good friends, usually made her feel like fleeing the scene. But today she was fine with wandering through campus – the same campus she’d always wandered through as a kid, the one she’d seen change as the students always stayed about the same – and not feeling like doing much of anything.

Jordan finally settled on a bench by one of the campus’ oak groves, the one near the edge of campus she’d always liked getting away to when she’d been younger. It’d been a long bike ride to get there, and then a short one, and now it wouldn’t take her long at all to walk back to the car. If she’d come to find somebody had rented out the gazebo for their wedding, it’d always offended her – that the space needed to be left empty in case someone needed time alone with their thoughts, just them and the trees. Even if there weren’t any flowers blooming this late in summer, the gardens were still beautiful. From the nearby benches, with the hill’s gentle slope, it was easy to sit and pretend there wasn’t anyone else who could possibly bother her. Nobody from the campus, or home, or the hospital could get to her out here. It’d been a good space to come after her father had died, and even now, it felt far enough away from everyone and everything Jordan was surprised to see a kid out in the meadow. A little girl, a toddler, was out playing with her dad. She laughed as he slow-chased after her at her own walking speed, letting her get up by herself when she fell down and sweeping her into his arms when she held up her own.

When he looked at Jordan and waved at her, she was in the sort of state where she couldn’t help but wave back at them, and she was only mildly irritated when he walked over to the bench where she’d already sat down.

“Hey,” he smiled. “Is it okay if we join you here for a bit?”

“Knock yourself out.” She thought she almost recognized the two of them from somewhere, maybe one of Harriet or Kath’s parties, maybe the hospital waiting room, and that _maybe_ was enough with how she still felt like she’d been wrung out to dry that she honestly didn’t care where they sat.

“Thanks.” He plopped down and his daughter wrapped her arms around his neck, not quite going slack but letting him take the weight. Looking over at their side of the bench, Jordan noticed the well-stocked diaper bag on the ground, but didn’t have time to mention it before he said, “Are you ready to head back home?” Jordan looked, but he was talking to his daughter. She buried her head in his neck and mumbled something Jordan couldn’t hear but that made him laugh, especially when she pushed away and tried getting out of his arms. “You’re not all tired out? Here I thought you were.” She babbled something, a few sounds arranged together while still trying to get out of the man’s arms, and he finally relented, standing and letting her go. He pulled a little fuzzy rabbit out of the diaper bag and sat back down as she began walking with it, carefully, preoccupied with staying upright while grasping it tight to her chest, and he flopped back down on the bench, hooking his elbows over the backrest and sighing up at the trees before turning to Jordan. “Sorry if we were bothering you out there. We’d just been inside for most of the morning and had to get some energy out –”

“It’s a public space. You don’t have to have a reason to be out in it, and you definitely don’t need to give me one.”

“All right.” 

The girl was holding the rabbit up so it faced the sky, like she wanted it to witness the majesty of nature. Jordan tried to remember what she’d read about transitionary objects in her old psychology classes, thought about Jack, and asked, “How long have you lived here?”

“How long have I lived here?”

“In town. How long have you lived in town.”

“About eight years now.”

“That’d be it.”

“What would be what?”

“I thought I might have recognized you.”

“I suppose that’s fairly flattering, since I don’t think we’ve met before today.”

“I’ve lived here a while, so it might’ve happened.”

“Yeah?”

“Townie. My parents are from here, I grew up here, moved away for college, but came back afterwards.”

“I know my daughter’s going to be growing up here – I work here, her – her mom works here, and we don’t plan on moving away, so if you’ve got any inside data on what it’s like growing up here, I’m sure my daughter will appreciate it.”

“I might,” Jordan smiled, turning to face him, the better to impart her hometown wisdom. “How old is she?”

“Eleven months.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have kids?” She was almost prepared to be insulted at the implication, but his face was open and curious, like he genuinely wanted to know.

“Yeah, one, a boy. Five months.”

“Five months was a good age,” he said, smiling. “Even if she was determined not to sleep through the night if she could help it. There’s more tantrums _now_ , if you can believe that.”

“A little. I know all kids are different, but – I’ll keep it in mind.”

“God, yeah. She started teething pretty early, around six months, and now she’s almost done with it.” He shook his head. “I’m not bragging. I’m really not. I’m sorry if it came out that way –”

“It didn’t.”

“Oh, good. I was just trying to say, teething and tantrums, they’re –”

“I’d think there’s a connection between having teeth rip through your gums and not having a lot of patience for the rest of the world.”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for my kid.”

“She’s still not all that interested in solids. She’s got enough teeth to manage and I know she likes them just fine, and she _will_ eat, you know, grown-up food if she’s eating at the table with us, social eating and everything with that, but if she has a choice, she’s going to take nursing.” He laughed. “It’d be nice if she weaned soon, but I’m not ready to force her to.”

“What’s her name?”

“What?” He whipped his head around to stare at her, his eyes gone sharp.

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Ah.”

“Her name’s _Ah?_ ”

“No, her name isn’t _Ah_ , but I think we’d better be leaving now.” His face was set sharp, and hard. “It was nice talking to you. But we’ll be heading off now. So have a good afternoon, Miss, um, Miss whoever you are.”

“Thanks, but –” She looked over at his daughter, and in an instant, recognized the girl’s smile. Jordan looked from the girl, to the man, and tried to process what she’d realized. He was getting his stuff together, making a point of deliberately not looking her way when he called out to his daughter to get her attention it was time to go and was about to head off when Jordan blurted out, “I’m not his mother.”

“What was that?” He slowly looked back.

“My son. I’m not his mother. The, what’s the whole big thing, the non-gestational genetic parent. The father. Me. It’s not me that’s the mother. His dad’s his mother. I’m right, aren’t I. You thought I was my son’s mother.”

“It’s not an unreasonable thing to think,” he said, staring down at her with open fascination. “So – five months ago, that’d be – his name’s Jack, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell his mother congratulations from number one.” Jordan laughed. “I’m sorry for that whole thing just now. We do need to be going, not _right_ this moment but soon, that part I didn’t make up. But sometimes things get where it’s hard to tell if it’s safe, so heading off is usually the best idea when that happens.” She nodded. “We might as well head off now. It was nice to meet you, though.”

“You too.”

From across the meadow, she couldn’t hear what they were saying, could only watch as Susan’s Mother took Susan into his arms and left, heading off to the nearby parking lot Jordan had biked through literally countless times in all her trips out to the oak grove. She watched them go and leaned back against the bench and knew there wasn’t anywhere on campus that was nearly as good for someone to relax and run around in after being cooped up in doctor’s offices all morning because little miracles of mad science needed all the attention they could get.

It wouldn’t be that hard to get his name. She could ask the doctors a few questions, see if she could get Perry to ask them something. Maybe she’d run into him somewhere in town – one of the grocery stores, a video rental place, maybe even out here again – and ask him what his name was then, but she knew she didn’t need it.

Jordan was almost tempted to tell Perry who she’d seen, but that almost wasn’t enough. When he asked where she’d been and what she’d talked about, she gave him the same answer he gave her when she asked him the exact same questions, and the bickering felt comfortable, let her get back inside her own skin. She felt relaxed enough that when Perry was in the shower and she had her hands full on diaper duty, she wasn’t so resentful of Jack as usual when he left her a present. She’d never changed Ben or Danni’s diapers, but she still half-remembered the smell. Half-remembering was enough to know Perry was right about milk crap smelling nice compared to formula crap.

“I’ll give him that for wanting to keep you on the tit,” she muttered as she held a wipe to Jack’s asshole to keep from getting an eyeful of number two while she changed him.

He peed on her hand and smiled at her. Earlier that week she and Perry had concluded that the face Jack was making, the face he was making now, was definitely him smiling and not just his reaction to gas or his practicing using his facial muscles.

Jack was a few years away from telling her _why_ he was smiling at her, but Jordan had a pretty good idea. “You think that’s funny? I can’t move my hand away and you piss on it just to see what I’ll do? Just for funsies?” Jordan glared and sighed. “You get that from me, you know. More than your dad. You’ll meet your aunt and uncle, and you’ll see which side of the family you get it from.” Once he was changed and they were both clean, she gathered him up and he turned into the usual deadweight in her arms. He was getting used to having a body he could use to move around, but sometimes he just let gravity take over. It wasn’t that bad; he was always warm and soft, and Jordan vaguely remembered holding Danni and Ben when they were still in the single months. Her parents had praised her for being such a good big sister, but she knew she’d have done it anyway and took the praise just the same.

“I’m not giving you a baby brother or sister.” She laid him down in his crib. “Just making sure you know that.”


	31. Love can make you weep, can make you run for cover

_Things are okay._

_Just okay?_

_Yeah. But it’s a good okay. Jordan sold her place and she’s moving in. We can’t talk about it because that’d draw attention to it and that’d be way over the line in terms of what we’re willing to acknowledge between ourselves, but she’s moved in._

_That’s more or less what I’ve come to expect from the two of you._

_The sleeping together’s better._

_You mean sex?_

_No, I mean just sleeping together. Sharing a bed without any sex. Which we still have, thank you, in bed and elsewhere._

_I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying yourselves so much. But the sleeping with Jordan._

_It’s just better._

*

“Cox, party of three?”

“Yeah, that’s us,” Jordan said, leading the way with Jack in her arms. Heads turned as they made their way to their table with the restaurant’s one high chair waiting for them. As Jack got settled in, people stopped staring outright, downgrading themselves to furtive glances. Cox knew everyone would be watching for the first little slip-up to prove why babies and young children had to be kept hidden and away from polite society until their eighteenth birthday and use that to shame him and Jordan for thinking their family was the exception.

Compared to the fear of public reprisal and bodily harm, the knowledge and awareness of public scrutiny was downright relaxing. Nobody was judging them for what they were, only for what they were doing. The only thing on everyone’s mind was why he and Jordan had decided to take Jack to a place with prices on the menu that didn’t include periods or round up to the nearest dollar. If they didn’t know any better – which Cox knew they didn’t, not having recognized anyone from the Study as he’d scanned the room on their way to the table – they were a perfectly typical family of three that just so happened to have an unusual set of ideas over what constituted an appropriate baby-friendly dining establishment. They were even following the appropriate dress code. Ben had managed to track down and send them a onesie printed up to look like a tuxedo, but they’d dressed Jack in a good pair of pants and shirt instead.

Cox couldn’t tell if their waitress was genuinely fine with Jack’s presence or not, but it didn’t much matter. Her smiling and fussing over him while simultaneously balancing her attention with his parents was earning her a thirty percent tip at the very minimum. Helen took their drink orders, cleared away Jack’s silverware, handed them the menus, filled Jack’s sippy cup from the pitcher while being careful not to give him any ice, recited the day’s specials, and promised she’d get Jack some paper and pencils if he needed any before disappearing into the background.

At the moment, Jack seemed well entertained with his napkin and the general quiet level of activity around the restaurant. 

“You sure you’re up to this?” Jordan asked.

“I have, without exaggeration, been looking forward to this since well before Jack was born. I’m still going to sit here, eat meat, drink alcohol, and finally get a proper grown-up celebration, and I’ll take the consequences as they come.”

“Any mess you make in the parking lot is going to be your responsibility to clean up.”

He’d fed Jack just before they’d left, both to keep Jack from getting cranky if dinner took a long time to arrive and be certain he could have a drink without any worrying. Even if Jack wanted to nurse later in the evening, it’d be a negligible amount in his system. When Helen handed him his scotch, neat, blue label, he took a moment to look at it shining amber in the glass, to contemplate the fact that he _could_ have a drink now if he so chose, and here he was choosing. Slowly, carefully, he took a sip that burned clean and sweet.

“Oh, this is good.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Jordan said, designated driver-appropriate lemonade in hand.

“Ooooooh, this is _good_.” It would have been wonderful to finish it right here and now, to let it hit him hard and fast – nineteen months without a drink meant one would be enough to get him done. But it was nice to sip and savor, too. To draw out the experience.

Jordan ordered the chicken and Cox ordered the ribeye, with extra sides of roasted Brussel sprouts and rosemary-garlic potatoes for the table, and Helen took everything down without needing a pen and paper. “And will this little prince want anything?”

“The pencils and paper will be great,” Jordan said. They’d brought a number of quiet toys with them – a small stuffed rabbit, a fabric teething ring – but as long as Helen was offering, it seemed worth it to take her up on it.

“Wonderful. I’ll be right back with them.” Helen smiled and waved at Jack before disappearing again.

“So how’s your lemonade?” Cox asked, smirking over the second half of his scotch.

“Lemony,” she said as he tore a roll open, buttering with a vengeance. He watched the butter melt gently into the soft cracks and crevasses, the lightness of the bread and the smooth heaviness of the butter playing off each other – it wasn’t even one of the tastes that Cox had particularly missed during the last few months of Jack’s pregnancy but more the _sensation_ of it. Good white bread with a hard crust had been off the table after the third month. By the last few weeks, as much as he’d liked being pregnant, he was longing for the days when he could eat whatever he wanted without any fetal input on the matter.

Four months ago, Jack had started teething and began on solid foods, and to Cox’s utter lack of surprise, the first non-breastmilk food he ate was yogurt. The exact same brand of organic whole-milk yogurt that was the only one Cox had managed to get down while he’d been pregnant. The two of them had been sitting at the table, Cox eating a late snack and Jack looking curious, and Cox decided to reward that curiosity and see if Jack would swallow any.

Jordan hadn’t quite grasped the excitement of the moment – “Isn’t it still milk?” “It’s not _my_ milk, is the thing” – but she’d been happy he was starting with solids and she was getting to feed him, too. The early teething hadn’t surprised her either; apparently she and Ben and Danni had all gotten their full sets of baby teeth in by the time they each turned two. Except with Jack, it’d started early and hadn’t stopped – so here he was, ten months old, with eight molars and all his central incisors and right on track for the rest of his teeth to come in during the next twelve months.

Besides having to get started on oral hygiene ahead of most families, it meant that when their food came and Cox cut a baby-sized morsel of steak for Jack, he could eat it without any trouble. The same thing happened with Jordan’s chicken, and piece by piece, the rest of the food on the table. Jack ate everything, taking particular delight in the sprouts and steak. Everyone was still watching them, but now that they had good reason to take notice of Jack, Cox didn’t mind quite so much. Ordinarily, he hated it when people came up in public and tried to talk to him, but tonight, between the scotch and the steak and how much Jack was enjoying himself, he couldn’t bring himself to even go so far as to get annoyed when someone wanted to praise him and Jordan for how good an eater Jack was, and on a related subject, what good parents he and Jordan were.

“Thank you!” Cox smiled before feeding Jack one last bite of sprouts, careful they weren’t reaching the limits of his stomach.

“And it’s very nice to see a father pay such attention to his son,” she went on, snapping Cox back to near-sobriety instantly. He glared at her, but she went on, “I just don’t often see a man –”

“Oh, I’m not his father.”

“Excuse me?”

Cox smiled, looked at Jordan smiling, and made a show of all his teeth. “I’m afraid I’m not his father.”

“Then are you…is…”

“Listen, honey, you’ve already said how fantastic you think our kid is, and we’re agreeing with you on all counts, so why don’t you get along out of here before we really start to make you feel awkward?” Jordan waved her hand at her. “Go on, scoot. Scoot!” The woman did, glancing over her shoulder and almost gasping when she saw Jordan still waving her away.

“You know, I’d _like_ to say I’m upset about that, except we both know I live for that sort of thing.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts; it’ll become unremarkable before you know it.”

Cox passed over an after-dinner coffee, and while he’d been able to tolerate sugar again since Jack’s birth, the memory of how much it’d turned his stomach was vivid enough he didn’t ask for a taste of Jordan’s chocolate cake. Jack got two bites and still asked for a feeding at home just before bed.

More interested in his usual nightly routine than any caloric intake, he barely ate anything.

“That’s it? That’s all?” The left nipple didn’t provide any more interesting than the right. “You’re not hungry? I admit I don’t exactly blame you for not being hungry. There’s something nice about getting so full from steak you don’t want to move. Your first steak dinner and not even a year old, well done, you, well done. Most people have to wait fifteen or twenty years, not you, lucky you.” Jack stayed relaxed all through the tooth brushing, didn’t try to bite Cox’s fingers or the toothbrush even once, and it wasn’t until Cox actually put him down that he started to fuss. “Oh, I see, because you had such a big night out you’re having a hard time relaxing. I got this for you, Jack, don’t worry.” He was still small enough there was some room left in Cox’s arms when he cuddled Jack up in them. But they’d soon be filled. “Here we go, back and forth, back and forth, relax, Jack, just relax and you’ll get off to sleep.”

He did, quickly, but Cox didn’t lay him down in his crib right away, keeping him in his arms for just a little bit longer, standing and swaying with Jack asleep on his shoulder.

“You’re getting to be such a big boy, puppy, such a big boy…and that’s okay, shh, shh, puppy, that’s okay, it’s okay.”


	32. Perhaps I am a miscreation

_I thought, when it happened, when it was over, I thought thank god I’m seeing Hanrahan soon. I don’t think I could talk about this with anyone else. Did you ever meet him? Were you one of the people who interviewed him?_

_I was, yes. I liked him._

_Everyone liked him. If he’d been a comic book character, his superpower would’ve been making friends._

_He was a good man. You were lucky to have him in your life._

*

Jordan knew she should have been there when it happened. There hadn’t been a lot of time – she’d barely left the hospital, and he was _gone_ when she got back less than an hour later. She could have been there. She could’ve been there to see it happen. Even if there wasn’t anything she could have done, literally _nothing_ she could have done, she would at least have been there. She hadn’t been there for her father; she should have been there for Ben.

If she hadn’t this, if she’d had that, if and then, if and everything, and none of it was worth giving a shit over. They’d planned Ben’s funeral during his first rounds of chemo, at his request and with his input, so that was already taken care of. Something nice and understated, a priest the family knew reciting some relevant scripture and poems Ben had loved since high school, all followed by an appropriately-sized wake. Her friends would be in town, Mom was coming in with the relevant relatives, Danni was staying at the house, everyone who’d ever met Ben at the hospital up to and including Dorian was giving her the space she needed, and Perry was trying to get Jack back onto an all-breastmilk diet as his own demented way of mourning.

She’d wanted something big and fun for Jack’s birthday party, with ponies and clowns and more than enough cake for everyone. Perry hadn’t wanted anything to do with it, saying all a one-year-old wanted for their first birthday was a ride on the swings in the park and maybe some ice cream afterwards and how the sort of party Jordan wanted was for the _parents_ and not Jack himself, and Perry himself had never been big on parties like that.

They’d fought about how the party was something she wanted to do for herself and her friends, and from her side of things, how Jordan was finally being engaged with being a parent. Perry wasn’t budging, and Jordan left the hospital after dropping Ben off to see about the pony rides. She’d come back empty-handed and seething forty minutes later, and when Nurse Espinosa looked at her getting off the elevator and went white in the face, Jordan didn’t even wonder why. Not about that, or about why Espinosa paged Perry a moment later, or even what made her come right up to Jordan to tell her how sorry she was.

“What the hell do you have to be sorry for?”

Then she saw Perry, and the look on his face, and knew that there was something more.

She got to see the body, at least. They’d gathered it up and laid it down, and it’d looked wrong, all flat and empty, but enough of Ben was there that she could still see him in what was left. When she stood by the bed and looked at the body resting there, she could almost pretend she’d been in the room when it happened. That she’d gotten to see him at the end, and there, no, there, then, _there_ he was gone.

It was nice to think that.

“The funeral’s the day after tomorrow,” Perry said some days later. “Have you polished your hooves yet?”

“Don’t you have some sackcloth you should be wearing? Something you were wearing that you ripped when he died?” She didn’t look at him. “Shouldn’t we be sitting on the floor in the dark with the curtains shut?”

“I don’t see how covering the mirrors could be at _all_ relevant to the mourning of a deceased Presbyterian.”

“Traditions are for the living, right?”

It wasn’t the thought of sitting through her brother’s funeral that was killing her, and it wasn’t even the fact that Perry won and got the first birthday party for Jack that he’d wanted. What was killing her was the thought of facing the same well-meaning cousins and worried friends that had made her dad’s funeral so hard to bear. She and Ben and Danni had held each other up as they’d gotten through the worst of the years after Dad died; even with Perry and Jack, even as much as her mother and Perry were mourning Ben, right now, she only had Danni to talk to about what it felt like to lose him.

Danni hadn’t had as many memories of their father as her and Ben and missed the idea of him more than Dad himself, but she’d had Ben in all of her life when Jordan hadn’t. She’d be staying in their guestroom instead of finding a hotel because God knew the two of them needed another pair of hands to help out with Jack with all the rest of everything going on. She’d taken the news of being an aunt better than her mom had taken the news of being a grandmother, almost immediately recovering and asking if she could come by and hold him. Jordan sometimes wondered if never having a little brother or sister meant she liked the baby-holding that much more, because she’d never gotten the same chances when she was a kid.

Staying in their house instead of an apartment meant Danni adhering to Perry’s smoking prohibitions that he tested by giving her a smell-down every time she came in the front door, even if he didn’t have his pregnancy nose anymore. Maybe he was counting on the humiliation of things to keep her sticking to it, but Jordan knew from the look on her face when she held Jack she wouldn’t have any trouble with it.

“Hey, baby boy, hey, hey, _hey_ , come on over, yeah-huh, get over here, come on over here!” He took four steps, fell to his knees, and speed-crawled the rest of the way to Danni’s arms, and she scooped him up with a big, deep laugh. “It’s your auntie Danni-Dan-Dan-Daniella here, gonna have some good time with you, uh-huh, yeah, _oh yeah yeah_ , happy little baby Jack, always so nice and happy to see you.” Perry rolled his eyes, and she kept standing and rocking Jack. “Do either of us need to be worried about tomorrow?”

“No, Mom and I are doing what we can to make sure we’ve got everything. Catering, flowers…”

“I meant about Jack here. I know. Mom knows. And I’m pretty sure the whole world knows he _exists_ , but do they know about him? Is it okay if I tell people I’m an aunt?” She looked at Perry, who laced his fingers together behind his head.

“You can tell people he’s my son. I don’t care if you say if he’s Jordan’s or not, but I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell people I’m his mother. Look, I’m never _not_ going to be proud of that, but tomorrow’s not going to be the best time to let people know. If they ask straight-out, just please, don’t answer. Say you can’t say or you don’t know.”

“Can I say he’s some evil space alien spawn by surrogate?”

“Sure, why not. And I know you always say you’re fine with however Jack was born, but the two of us –”

“I never actively hated you at any point in the marriage or divorce.”

“Bingo,” Jordan said.

“Do you care what she says if people ask her?”

“Yeah, do you care what I say if people ask me?”

“Unless she tells people I’m his mother, I honestly can’t think of what she might say I could possibly care about.”

“Can I tell them I’m his mother?” Jordan asked.

“Okay, that. Please don’t.”

“So if I tell people he’s ours and they draw their own conclusions, then that’ll be their own problem for going off assumptions based on their outdated ideas about – what was it in the _Times_? Gender dictation?”

“Gender essentialism,” Danni said and smiled.

Jordan had friends and cousins she knew would understand when they found out she hadn’t told them she’d had a kid – maybe she didn’t see them that often, or they were just as careful about maintaining their bodies as she was and knew she wouldn’t want them to see her with the swollen ankles and puffy face. Maybe they knew babies weren’t everything TV and movies made them out to be. Her mother had already said she wouldn’t tell anyone, and knowing that Jack himself wasn’t a secret they had to keep made facing the funeral a little easier. 

They’d buried Dad in winter. Perry had a lot of things to say about winter in California, but it was still winter in the ways it counted, even for someone from Pittsburgh. The day had been cold, wet, and miserable, and she’d shivered and pulled her gloves tight over her hands and wanted to be inside and warm just as much as she wanted to be outside and miserable. She couldn’t remember what the priest had said then, and she couldn’t hear what he was saying now. It was bound to be something wonderful. Ben had been wonderful. Her dad had been a mountain.

Jordan had wanted to bury her father. Not dig the grave and throw in the body, but throw some dirt on the coffin. She’d wanted to throw a shovelful of dirt in there – even a handful would’ve been fine. When he’d been laid into the ground, she’d wanted to at least take a handful of dirt and throw it in there to make being there mean something.

When it finally came time to put Ben in the ground, it wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it’d be. It wasn’t as much like her father’s funeral as she’d worried it’d be. The plans Ben had drawn up when he thought he was going to die made certain of that for the ceremony, and when it came time to bury him, when she watched him go down, she realized she’d had more time to get used to the idea of Ben dying than she’d ever had for her father. She’d already pictured her life without him. Now all she had to do was live it.

Jordan took the shovel after her mother, and Perry handed her Jack to do it after Danni went, all of them burying Ben in the springtime sunshine.

She knew he would’ve liked knowing he got buried in spring.

Having Jack there helped. Even if he wouldn’t ever have any meaningful memories of Ben, the solid twenty pounds of warm baby in her arms was more comforting than any drink in the world could be. She held him close, and he put his arms around her neck, and she wondered what he thought of everything around him. Maybe he knew enough to gather everyone was sad, or maybe he thought adults wore black to their parties because the kids got all the other colors for theirs. If Perry was right and one-year-olds didn’t care about big events, at least he wasn’t missing his own birthday party.

Next year’s was going to be a bitch to organize. She was pretty sure she’d been blacklisted from renting out ponies, what with having to cancel and default on the security deposit, and good luck getting Perry to call on her behalf. Danni, maybe – she’d also taken enough horseback-riding lessons to know ponies were a good way to start things.

Jordan wanted Jack in her arms during the wake, but when she went to ask Perry, he looked her dead-on in the eyes and said, “He should be with his mother right now.”

Danni slipped outside to smoke, and Jordan almost wanted to join her. Everyone was saying how sorry they were for her, and some of them were even being sincere. She wanted Jack in her arms again, to give her something to hold and to have something else to talk about, but Perry was using their son for funereal interference right now. The crowds meant she couldn’t get close enough to hear what questions people were asking and how he was answering. Then she lost sight of him for a moment and when she spotted him again, he still had Jack in his arms but was ducking into one of the bigger closets.

She grabbed Dorian by the arm. “Ow! Miss Sullivan, I’m so sorry for your loss, but if you could let go please you’re squeezing _thank you_ as Ben was such a mensch I –”

“Go in there and check on Perry for me.” 

“What?”

“I’m not going in there right now. Tell him to come see me the moment he gets out here.” Jordan shoved him towards the door. He got the message and fumbled his way inside, and when he didn’t come out right away that confirmed it. She couldn’t believe Perry’s gall. It was so perfectly and selfishly him to hide away and throw in a feeding on top of that, leaving her alone to brave the platitudes and canned responses and forced sympathy.

The shows of genuine, honest emotion were even harder to deal with, all the sincerity and public intimacy. Some of them were all right, though: When Kath came by, she didn’t even try to hug her, and neither did Oliver, his arms full of Margaret; they said they’d treat her to some stiff drinks when she was up to making company, and that made her smile.

Dorian eventually wandered back outside, slipping out of the closet and closing the door behind him, looking like he’d reached out and touched the face of God.

“Hey, DJ, you okay there?”

“It was…it was everything I’ve dreamed of,” he said, dazed and awestruck.

“Good for you. Now go away.” He didn’t need a second reminder.

When Perry finally stepped out of the closet, Jordan didn’t care that he had Jack in his arms; she grabbed him and hissed, “What do you think this is? Just sneaking away like that, hiding away –”

“It was good for Jack. It calmed him down so he won’t get stressed over missing his usual afternoon nap. And now that he’s fed, I can go have a drink. I can have _two_ drinks. So excuse me,” he said, depositing their son in her arms. Nice as it was to have Jack in them, Jordan thought she might’ve liked a drink more.

She waited until Perry was gone from the bar to get one herself, knowing full well what the sight of a baby in one hand and a drink in the other would say to people and not giving a shit. Not even when one of the cousins who knew Jack was hers and Perry’s came up to stick his nose into Jordan’s business.

“Isn’t he still breastfeeding?”

“Yeah.”

“Then shouldn’t you not –”

“For God’s sake – look, even if I was, this is my brother’s funeral. This isn’t the time or the place to say a goddamn thing about what I should and shouldn’t be doing to mourn my brother. He’s barely cold, we _just_ put him in the ground maybe two hours ago. I could really use something to help me get through the day and all the _oh I’m so sorry_ everybody’s saying to me just isn’t cutting it right now. Could you let me have this one drink in peace?” She gulped half the brandy down, and when she came up for air, he was gone. Jack looked on in confusion, and she almost wanted to let him have a sip, just so he could know what it tasted like.

He got some de-stemmed maraschino cherries instead.

Dealing with Ben’s estate wasn’t as hard as his funeral. The work of it gave Jordan something to focus on, and since Perry went back to work at the hospital, Jack went with him, which was one less thing for Jordan to worry about. Ben’s will wasn’t that different from the first time he’d drawn one up, and if they hadn’t caught the leukemia when it had, they’d be using the old version he’d had notarized back in the early nineties written on three-ring binder paper. Both versions listed local charities, global environmental charities, and provisions on whoever wanted his stuff from his family and his friends. The new one had a few mentions of a cancer charity because of course it would.

Ben’s shares in the family holdings would be divided between Jordan and Danni as per the bylaws, and that was a whole afternoon of paperwork to sit through. Board meetings at least had the potential for a bit of a thrill whenever it came time to decide something big. Following instructions on where to sign for things that had already been decided decades ago when the older Sullivan generations had come to California to make their fortunes just had her staring out the window whenever she wasn’t actively being spoken to.

Clearing out his apartment wasn’t nearly so straightforward. There were some instructions on which charities got which portions of the profits from the estate sale, but that was it. All Jordan wanted was to keep the cousins from descending on the apartment and Ben’s stuff like a plague of locusts on a verdant wheat field.

“Maybe we should’ve put up a request registry at the wake,” she said to Danni as she looked through Ben’s liquor cabinet.

“I think unless someone asks for something specific, we don’t need to worry.” Danni sighed. “We really should pay attention to this part, though.”

“Why’s that?”

“We need to know what to do when Mom kicks it. I’m serious. She’s not going to be around then for us to ask her what to do, so we should pay attention now.” Jordan stared up at her, rum in one hand and brandy in another. “What? You know it’s true. Mom did it for Dad and she’s doing it for Ben. We’re also doing it for Ben, but we’re gonna have to do it for her someday.”

It was too easy to laugh at that to feel good, but it was too good to laugh to feel bad she’d done so. The day did get easier after that, the activity picking up, Chinese food getting delivered for lunch, and the bulk of the work getting wrapped up – Danni offered to do a mass e-mail, but Mom said she’d be fine with making some calls to the closer relatives, and Jordan took home the better liquor bottles and the last of the groceries Ben had bought a week ago when he’d come home, dear God, _just a week ago_.

She and Perry started working their way through Ben’s bourbon that night, with Jordan doing most of the drinking for once. When he told her how after his father had died, he and his sister took a run through the house and had let their last living aunt handle the rest of the business, she understood his grappling at the concept of intimacy for what it was.

There wasn’t any getting out of the next morning’s board meeting, so Jordan took it as an excuse to spend the rest of the day at the hospital, trying hard not to feel bad about leaving her mother and Danni to box up the sheets and towels and mostly succeeded. When she stopped by late in the afternoon with coffees for everyone, she still didn’t feel bad. Just wet and empty. They both took the coffee, and Mom told her about some of the more interesting things they’d found – Ben’s art textbooks from grad school, a vintage stovetop percolator, some tie-dyed shirts from the college’s yearly springtime craft fair. Danni didn’t say much, and Jordan didn’t notice until they got into the car and saw Danni was holding a sizable thick envelope.

“What’s that?”

“It’s something I found under his bed. I didn’t tell Mom about this – I mean, when I found it, I knew you had to have it. But I need to wait until we get home to show you.” She fiddled with one of the corners. “Don’t worry. I didn’t really look inside at any of it, just at a couple of the ones on top.”

“So what is it?”

“You can wait twenty minutes to drive us back.”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

“I’m asking nicely. Trust me, you’re going to understand.”

Perry was already home, giving Jack a late-day feeding that Jordan knew would spoil his appetite for everything except more breastmilk. She didn’t argue the point, not when it was Perry’s nipples on the line, and waited until Jack was finished to get Danni to finally show them what she’d been holding secret.

“Ben would’ve wanted you to have these.”

“Yeah,” Perry said, blinking at the first photo. “Yeah, he would have.”

It wasn’t as though Jack wasn’t a thoroughly documented kid: as a child from the Matthias Study, he was one of the most well-documented and often-photographed children in the world. But there was a difference between the dispassionate pictures recording Jack’s development and Ben’s photos, enough that she and Perry stopped at that fourth picture and waited until well after dinner, when Jack was asleep and Danni was busy, to close the bedroom door and look through them all. They sat on the floor, leaned against the foot of their bed, and held the photos carefully as they looked through them one by one.

There was Perry in the operating room; there was Jack just being born; there was the three of them caught off-guard by Ben for their first family picture. He’d taken pictures of the nurses, the doctors, Matthias herself, the hospital where it all happened. There was that God-awful _Vanity Fair_ thing with Perry posing, with Jordan laughing, with Ben and Perry’s faces off-center in the frame. Perry nursing Jack in the glider; Jack sleeping; Jack getting a bath; Jack listening to music Perry remembered being Van Morrison.

“He had good taste at two weeks,” Jordan smiled. She didn’t miss not having been there for every second of the beginning of his life – she knew she didn’t. But she was more thankful for these pictures and seeing what it’d been like than she could say to anyone, even a therapist.

“He was a happy baby,” Perry said, one arm around Jordan’s shoulders, leaning into her. She didn’t push him away. “Dawn must’ve sent these to Ben. I guess he never got around to sending them to us once he got them.”

“Yeah, he could be like that.” The envelope was postdated to just before Ben had left last year. He would’ve gotten them and hadn’t brought them over before he’d left again because he’d thought he’d have more time. “It never really bothered me.”

“I just…”

“Yeah?”

“We’re here talking about your brother. The two of us, here. No, I don’t mean there’s this ineffable spirit within all of us until we breathe our last, I don’t mean that. I mean, you were there for him to be able to talk about him. You were – you were both there, as kids, and you’re here now, and – forget it. This is the sort of thing I should be talking about with my shrink.”

“No, it’s okay.” She leaned over into him. “I think I get it. It’s good to have someone who was there. It’s someone you can talk to later.”

“Yeah.” Perry stroked her arm, his eyes on Jack’s face from his first day of life. “Something like that.”


	33. The moth don’t care when he sees the flame

_I just wanted to ask. I know you’ll probably say no. In all honesty, I’m expecting you to say no. But I wouldn’t have wanted to come here and not ask. Look, don’t – please don’t let me get my hopes up about this. Tell me you’ll say no, and I can leave and get on with the rest of my life._

_All right._

_If it’s a no just tell me now, all right?_

_I can’t do that. There’s other people I’d need to talk to, and I’m not someone who can make that sort of call._

_Okay._

_But in all honesty from me, I hadn’t expected to hear someone asking me that._

_So when can I hear you tell me no?_

_I don’t know._

_I know it’ll be no._

_Not necessarily._

_But probably. Could we just go ask the people you need to ask to find out about this? Right now? I don’t mind cutting our session short._

_Percival._

_Yes?_

_I’m going to ask._

_You will?_

_Yes._

_I’m assuming it’s good data for you. That someone asked._

_It certainly is. But you remember just how much there was to find out before we’d considered saying so much as maybe the first time you came in here._

_Yeah._

_If I asked and they said yes, we’d have to start right back at the beginning._

_*_

Ever since JD first heard Cox say the name _Hanrahan_ in a mixture of respect, sincerity, and awe, he’d wondered exactly what sort of person could make Cox talk like that. The layer of secrecy of Cox knowing something JD didn’t and both of them knowing that drove JD even more wild over who she might be. He’d read articles, he’d watched interviews and seen pictures, but he hadn’t gotten any idea who she was as a person. A doctor, that was clear, but not a person. Sure, he’d entertained a few possibilities, but without actually speaking to her, he couldn’t know how accurate his fantasies were.

The third idea he’d come up with hadn’t been that far off the mark. Doctor Bernadette Rowan Hanrahan, licensed psychiatrist, pregnancy specialist, mother of three, smooth-faced with sharp lips and straight dark hair just to her shoulders. She’d greeted him in the lobby while wearing a smile that said _you don’t have to trust me if you don’t want to but I’d really like it if you’d try_ – a smile JD had practiced more than a few times, one of the necessary smiles doctors had to have in their facial expressions toolbox – and walked him down the hospital’s hallways, let him look around her office, and get comfortable at his own pace. Hanrahan didn’t prompt him to start speaking, just sat back and let him go when he was ready.

“It’s an honor to be here,” he blurted.

“I’m glad you could come.”

“I don’t just mean it for helping out with the Matthias Study, and don’t get me wrong, I’m _thrilled_ to even be this _close_ to it – aside from when Doctor Cox was pregnant at the hospital and being with him now, aside from that. It’s that being asked to come in and talk to you, to help out in some little way, I know my name’s probably not going to get used in any of the supplementary materials for journal articles, but knowing I was asked to come in, even so, that’s – it’s an honor. All of it.”

“Thank you.”

“So…” He clapped an open hand against his fist. “So we’re here to talk about Doctor Cox.” She nodded. “Is there anything you were hoping to hear about him?”

“I don’t want you to think there’s something I’m waiting for you to say. I have a few things I’d like to touch on, but I don’t want you to feel pressured to answer in any way.”

“I see. And these topics are…because I’ve worked with him for almost three years now, and he’s sort of my mentor, you see, so I think there’s a lot about him I could tell you. I’m sure you know a lot of it, being his therapist and all, but we’ve worked together over some pretty harrowing patients, and you get to know a person when you go through that sort of thing together.”

“I’m sure you do. What I’m trying to do is put together a broad idea of how he’s doing.”

“Is there any follow-up to this? Because if it is, I’d be plenty willing to come in again.”

“That’s not the general arrangement with these interviews.”

“Are you worried about him?”

“No.”

“So what about him do you want to talk about?”

“I want you to tell me how you think he’s doing.”

“Pretty good. I mean, I’d say he’s doing fine. It’s – he’s already had a baby through the Study. Right? I’ve seen him, I’ve held him – please don’t tell Cox, I had to _beg_ the pediatrics nurses and buy them all pizza – and I know you see him a lot, weekly. I’m sure there’s a lot I can tell you he’s not telling you because we both know he’s is a very careful guy when it comes to how he’s performing his persona. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“We’ve talked about that more than a few times.”

“Do you want me to talk about how he’s been doing at work since Jack was born? He’s – I’m just wondering why I’m here.”

“You could tell me how he’s been at work since Jack was born.”

“Work-work itself is the same. Because if he’s already had a baby, why would…wait.”

“Yes?”

“Can he even _do_ that? Is that – I’m probably off-base with it, but would it even be _legal_ or something for him to – no, you’ve got to have me here on follow-up. Seeing a bigger picture on how he’s doing. At not-work work, you know, hospital politics with the Chief of Medicine, he – what?”

“He was right when he told me you were good at this.”

“Doctor Cox said that about me? He did?” Hanrahan nodded. “Yes! Yes! Oh yes, oh joy and happy day!”

“You can sit down.”

“Right.” JD sat back down on the couch, getting comfortable in the cushions. One side of the couch was a little more indented than the other, and Hanrahan hadn’t minded him taking a minute to choose between them; it was just as much JD wanting a firm seat as it was him wondering which side Cox used more. “So what else did he – sorry. We’re here for him, not me. So he – he’s really looking to have another baby.”

“He’s looking, yes. We haven’t gone beyond that. We’re in the initial examination phase, and a fair amount of that is interviewing the people close to him in his life.” JD forced himself to sit still, nodding and keeping eye contact with Hanrahan as he ran his thumb over the fingernails of his closed hand. She continued, “We know he’s willing, and that counts for a great deal. But we’d never anticipated any of the mothers wanting to have a second child. The main reason we’re even considering it as a possibility is because he suggested and asked for it.”

“I’ve got a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve been following the Matthias Study for a while, even before Cox got pregnant, and you’ve always promised no more than fifty births. So why are you considering pushing it up to fifty-one when –”

“We’d keep it at fifty births.” She had a sweet, gentle smile, nothing like the _please trust me_ smile – this was something real and honest, nothing hiding behind it. “If Percival had a second child, it’d mean a total of forty-nine mothers.”

“You call him _Percival?_ ” JD gaped.

“Sometimes,” she grinned. “It gets his attention.”

“I’d say it would.” He could imagine the reaction he’d get if he went one step farther than calling Cox _Perry_ ; he shook his head to get rid of the lingering sounds of trumpet fanfare and chariot wheels. “And I take it the data you’d get from a _multigravido_ would be important enough to leave that last mother out of things.”

“It might.”

JD nodded, trying and failing to imagine the balance between that last mother waiting so long and coming so close and Cox having a second child. He knew even if Cox got back in on the list again, it’d mean all the preparatory phases a second time around – hormones trials, stress tests, the threat of tissue and organ rejection, whether or not a body nature hadn’t ever intended have the capacity to fulfill a human gestation that had managed to do so once could do so again. Starting Cox way back at the beginning. If they agreed to it.

“You’d have to put him through everything all over again,” he said, looking Hanrahan in the eye. “Even if he didn’t get so far as to be a mother again, you’d still be able to draw from however far he got.”

“There’s a lot we could learn from that.”

“Yeah.” He felt like he was talking out of the bottom of a well. No, that must be how Cox was looking at things, and JD was looking down at him. “Why are you even considering this?”

“Because we didn’t think anyone would ask to have a second baby.”

“So just because he asked?”

“Just because he asked.”

“Why haven’t you just told him no?”

“Because we think he might be able to.” JD sat up straighter, leaning in to listen. “If there weren’t any concerns about the baby itself –”

“Wait. Hang on a second, what do you mean, if you had any concerns about the baby?” 

“There’s the possibility a second pregnancy would stress him beyond what he could bear and put the fetus at risk.”

“Well, the good news is you don’t have to because if you said that, he’d stop asking.”

“Tell me what you mean by that.”

“I’ve worked closely enough with Doctor Cox for long enough to know if he thought there was _any_ possibility a second pregnancy would be risky for the fetus – I mean, more of a risk than any pregnancy. If _this_ pregnancy he wants so much might be dangerous for it, then I know he’d stop asking. I know he’d hate to, and I know he’d probably end up in a depressive state for a couple of weeks and yell at all us residents and mourn the chance he never had because who doesn’t do that, right, but he’d accept it and move on with his life. I know if you told him you were more worried for the baby than for him, he’d let mother number fifty stay where he is.”

“You’re certain?”

“Certainly I’m certain.”

Hanrahan smiled at him. JD couldn’t quite make out what this one was trying to tell him, or if it was just for her. He knew he must have said something good to get it there, and the next forty minutes were spent a lot more relaxed than their first ten.

“Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?” she asked just before it was time for him to go.

“Two things, actually. Thanks. The first one, and I know you’ve got a pretty sizable case load – even if you’re just seeing a few of the mothers that’s a full portfolio, and I know I’m leaving here in a few minutes – but if you could offer a consult on this one dream I had about Perry, and I swear I wouldn’t be asking if it was about someone else.”

“All right.”

“And yeah, I like to think of him as a mentor figure, my big role model in my adult life and medical career, but – okay, I had this dream about him. Where he was my dad. And that was fine, but then he was in it a second time, twice, as my mother.” She nodded slowly. “So I wasn’t sure what to make of that, and I probably wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t have doctor-patient confidentiality, but…”

“I can refer you to a colleague.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“The second thing?”

“Sorry?”

“You said you had two things you wanted to ask.”

“Right, yes. The pictures on your desk, that’s your family?”

“Yes.”

“Your husband, your son, your daughters. Your father.”

“Yes.”

“And Diane Matthias?”

“Yes,” Hanrahan said, smiling. “She’s my mother.”


	34. I’m put together beautifully

When Cox and Jordan had first discussed bath time labor division, it’d been a fifty-fifty swap from night to night, the better to let one parent have a half hour to sit and do _nothing_ while the other spent that time lavishing attention on their child. Things hadn’t gotten complicated until circumstances demanded a renegotiation of terms – when it came time to figure out who was responsible for washing the child’s hair, and when and how to do it. And they’d had to include those getting their hair washed, not just those doing the washing.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“All right, then.” Cox handed over the small towel. “You know the drill, face down.”

Jane nodded, pressing the washcloth up against her eyes to keep every possible agitating molecule of shampoo out of them and dipping her head down to better let her mother wash her hair. She’d gotten his curls and Jordan just didn’t know how to manage them – her first and only attempt at combing out the knots was too harsh for Jane to manage, leaving their daughter crying and ensuring Cox was the one to oversee all of her hair care. Jack was eight and old enough to shower unsupervised. But for the time being, the once-a-week washing of Jane’s hair was entirely Cox’s responsibility.

He began lathering up her hair as he watched her shoulders to make sure he never accidentally pressed too hard on her scalp. “Tell me how school was today.” 

“We found some snails in the lettuce, and Riley said to squish them but I said _no_ to Mister Andrew and so all of us in class let them go in the bushes on the edge of the yard.”

“That was very kind of you. I bet those snails are happy you were there for them.”

“And I sat next to Harry during story-time.”

“Oh, did you now?”

Before she’d started preschool, he and Jordan gave her a talk on what to say when people asked about her family that was almost identical to the one they’d given Jack. They’d told Jane she had a brother and a mommy and a daddy, and that was all she ever needed to say, no matter what people asked her, no matter what they said. She was smart, and they’d practiced, but Cox knew he’d never stop worrying about what people might ask or what his children might say. Jack was old enough to lie, but Jane wasn’t there yet.

Her not being old enough to lie also meant that, next to the possibility he’d get a call from one of her teachers about the forty-sixth child of the Matthias Study trying to explain the difference between _mommy_ and _mother_ , she always told him everything. The morning singing, the jumping and counting games they did outside after lunch, diving back earlier in the day to talk about using all the blues in the box to draw her dress, sitting next to her best friend Harriet at story-time, how she’d drawn knees on her legs in the picture to make sure the picture-Jane could sit down in the chair she’d drawn, going back ahead to describe the way her teacher had explained the drip system and raised beds in the school garden with no concern for chronological order.

“And then before that, after lunch, when we were all done and all cleaned up and back on the big rug, Mister Andrew read us all part of a Peter Pan book.”

“I want to hear all about the Peter Pan book, but we need to wash, so when we’re done washing, then start telling me. You got your eyes closed?”

“Closed up tight!”

“Then chin up, here it comes.” Keeping the washcloth in place, Jane tilted her head back as far as she could go and giggled as Cox poured cup after cup of water over her head and it ran down her back. When her hair was free of shampoo, she leaned her head forward again for the conditioning treatment.

“Do you want strawberry or coconut?”

“Coconut, please.”

“One coconut smoothie baby, coming right up.” He kept his touch light, working the conditioner down through her dark brown hair. She grabbed his hand anyway – not to stop him because he was pressing too hard, but to hold his fingers up against her face, and when he realized that, his heart started beating normally again. “What’s this, bunny?”

“I’m just sniffing.” She made an exaggerated inhalation sound. “I like sniffing the smell. Coconut’s always my favorite.”

“I thought ocean breeze was your favorite.”

“Ocean breeze is _sometimes_ my favorite, but coconut’s always my favorite.”

“If you say so,” he laughed, and she let go so he could finish. “So will you tell me about the Peter Pan book now?”

And she did, telling him a story he already knew – a bullshit story if there ever was one, but she was young enough to enjoy it, and she’d liked the idea of a sister having little brothers, and she liked the part about keeping dreams neat and tidy. At least her teacher had the stones to read his class the old Barrie original: there was enough substance in that to justify the time. Just as long as he didn’t get lazy and play them the old Disney cartoon version. Definitely not that the live-action one from a few years back with the boy that Jordan said was growing up into a _delicious cupcake_ was much better; Jack wasn’t going to watch _that_ one until he was ten, at least. Jane had a ways to go, no matter how fast she was growing. Turning five was finally old enough to head out and explore the foothills with her daddy and brother. 

Four weeks ago, after that last big hike of the summer, she’d gotten dirty enough to leave a ring around the drain, and Cox had needed to scrub underneath her fingernails while she looked away and held her head high, proud of her accomplishments. While Jordan had a spa day and time with her friends, he’d taken their children out on what most adults would have seen as a slow stroll, but to Jane and Jack, it’d been a grand hiking adventure – which meant it’d been one for Cox, too. Jack was happy to have his little sister along and show her as much of the world as he could, broking no argument or debate that he be the one to help flip up rocks _towards_ them and see the beetles scurry away, laughing at her from on top of the rocks she wasn’t tall enough to climb on her own, and making her laugh a moment later by jumping off and landing in a big cloud of dust.

Neither of them minded Cox helping Jane climb up, not when he joined them both a moment later.

Summer in California meant tall grasses Jane could hide in while standing, and it meant dry heat and making sure they all drank plenty of water. It meant seeds picked off socks and keeping an eye out for lizards sunning themselves on the rocks, and on the rare days with breezes, it meant clean blue skies from the mountains all the way to the end of the world.

The summer he’d been pregnant with Jane had been the one summer of his life California’s heat hadn’t been welcome – he’d tried shaving his head to see if it helped, and it had, even if it’d all grown back in and then some by mid-July. Jack’s pregnancy had been nothing to Jane’s, and the combination of the heat, gestating Jane, and the disastrous Memorial Day barbecue at the Maugham’s had made it all one of the worst summers of his life. 

Everything, from the _look_ on Oliver’s face when Cox had arrived five months along and inarguablypregnant to the way Kath had intervened when Oliver wouldn’t back down from arguing Cox had taken his child from him, how Jordan had needed to step in, how upset Jack had been to leave so early when he’d been having so much fun playing with Margaret, and how it wasn’t Jordan’s fault for wanting him to come or Cox’s fault for wanting to have a little social time with his family before he had another child, had made it a day they’d agreed as a family to never discuss and never mention, and that Cox knew they’d never be able to forget.

Six weeks after that, he’d been put on bed rest for the rest of the pregnancy. Within an hour of coming in for his usual weekly physical, he’d been admitted as a patient and told under no uncertain terms he wasn’t going to venture farther from his bed than the bathroom until his baby was delivered – which turned out to be five weeks early, well before either of them was ready, but any longer, and they’d be risking brain damage to her and heart damage to him. It wasn’t the first time the Study’s doctors had to make the call, but thankfully, it was the last.

For Jane, he’d endured the personal indignity of pumping, and for Jane, he’d suffered through seeing her in the NICU, with the tubes and needles and the limited and supervised holding periods, counting the minutes before she could lie in his arms and nurse. It’d been too many hours, too many days, and when she was finally handed to him, plump and awake and the baby she should have been born, he didn’t know how he could put her down again.

“Ready to get out?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Well, I’ll be draining it in a minute, so you’re free to stay in there, but the water’s leaving, and it’ll be pretty cold in there without any water. Not even a towel.” He sighed. “You could come out and get a towel _now_ if you wanted…”

“I’ll stay another minute.”

“If you say so.” He pulled the drain, and it was an impressive display worthy of her mom when Jane stayed in the tub until it was empty. She climbed out to stand on the mat and quickly wrapped herself in a striped beach towel that was more for warmth than getting dry. That was a job she left to her dad, who knew just how to pat and dab and rub her legs and arm and tummy and to leave the fine work of her face and hair and hands to the little girl herself. Cox knew that even as much as she enjoyed him helping out, soon he’d just hand her the towel. Then Jordan would teach her how to shower, and that’d be an end to their shared bath time.

Knowing the California water table appreciated it only went about halfway towards comfort.

In the meantime, he watched her get into her pajamas, brush her teeth – every child of the Matthias Study had gotten all their baby teeth by two years, and still nobody knew why – and, maybe because it’d been such a tiring day or maybe because she knew him better than he thought she did, hold out her arms to him.

“What’ve we got here? We’ve got a little girl who’s trying to get her message known, and it could be _take me up_ or it could almost possibly be _tickle me please,_ but until I get in close and –”

“Daddy!” She laughed as he leaned in, and she wrapped her arms close around her torso to leave no vulnerable ticklish spots. “Take me up, please.”

“Ah, please now – for a please, sure. And now where are we off to?”

“I wanna go to bed, please.”

“Then by all means, off to bed we go.”

Once deposited under the covers, Jane snuggled down with her bear, a soft black creature Paige had sent when her niece was born. Jordan had taken a picture of Jane when it arrived, a baby girl next to a toy as big as she was. She hadn’t picked up Ben’s old hobby with his passion or talent, but she was the one documenting their children’s lives now. It was her more than Cox who’d been responsible for the big, glossy book published by the Study two years ago having _‘courtesy of the estate of Ben Sullivan’_ in the copyright section in the back. The pictures included Jack asleep in his mother’s arms, a couple of his birth, one of him with his father and one from just before he’d turned a year old and a couple more besides. A handful of Ben’s best. He’d never thought about having a legacy through his photography, but if Cox believed in that sort of thing, he’d think Ben would be happy with things turning out like that.

He’d sent a copy of it to Oliver specifically, half to apologize for the barbecue and half to rub it in his face that Cox was in there twice and Oliver didn’t even get a mention as the Pete Best of the Matthias Study. The promise he’d be the mother of the first baby once it opened up again, if it ever would, must have been the coldest comfort ever known.

Cox still smiled about that, sometimes.

Tonight, he smiled down at his daughter, kissing her goodnight.

It wasn’t at all strange to him that he’d been scared of taking care of his children – he was _still_ terrified on an hourly basis – but now with them here, sometimes all the fear came out, _flew_ out, and left him with nothing but a fragile, shivering joy. The idea that a parent could simply love their children was still laughable to him. There was nothing simple about it. Some people couldn’t manage, and it still left him shaken that he was one of the ones who could. He’d never wanted to be like either of his parents and had gone to the edge of the world and past the horizon to be certain of that. Even if he hadn’t – even if his children had arrived through the usual, ordinary way – he knew, now, that he would never have done anything but love them. And he knew his children would never spend so much of a second wondering that about themselves.

When the Matthias Study ended, it’d helped advance science and medicine by immeasurable, almost infinite quantities, bringing humanity one step closer to the bright and shining future everyone dreamed about – the applied research towards long-term autoimmune treatments _alone_ was breathtaking work – and for his part and participation, Cox had gotten his family out of it. Jane, and Jack, and even Jordan. Years ago, the idea of a family had been so far beyond him becoming a mother he’d never given it any thought.

Maybe it wasn’t fair that he’d come out so much farther ahead, but that was just how it’d managed to happen. Life wasn’t fair, but maybe – maybe just for his family, maybe just for him, maybe just this once – it could still be good.


	35. Get dirty, get clean, get some new scene

This was as much a love letter to my hometown with its greenbelts and radioactive beagles as it was a serious attempt at trope reconstruction and an a textual rendering of the ice cream apocalypse aesthetic. There’s a lot of strange things that happen in small towns in California, and they’re all the stranger for being fairly normal for the people that live with them. I wanted to balance the fantasy and reality of this story the way the show balanced realism and silliness, and I knew keeping close to the ground – focusing on one patient that would willingly ensconce himself away from most popular news and media outlets, dealing more with the changes to his life than the world at large – would help me maintain that. Which was also very much my experience of growing up in California.

-

A round of applause to my beta-reader [Naemi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Naemi/pseuds/Naemi) for helping me wrangle my commas and keep me from repeating myself; [Tinsnip](http://tinsnip.tumblr.com/) for her medication consultation; [Perspi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/perspi/pseuds/perspi) for continuity notes; [Paraka](https://paraka.dreamwidth.org/) for helping me with the formatting; and to [AnneTheCatDetective](http://annethecatdetective.tumblr.com/), for helping me get this off the ground and keeping it moving in the very early drafting stages.

My artist, [angelus2hot](http://angelus2hot.livejournal.com/), for being so generous with her time and efforts – I had no idea what she’d come up with, and I’m stunned at her work.

I’d like to thank the mods behind [Small Fandom Big Bang](http://smallfandombang.livejournal.com/) for organizing this challenge, which did the job of lighting a fire under my ass and getting me to write with a discipline I don’t think I otherwise would have had.

To everyone who offered me suggestions for the music when I called out for timeline-appropriate suggestions and gave me recommendations for artists I now can’t imagine myself without – [akamarykate](http://akamarykate.tumblr.com/), [ancient-string,](http://ancient-string.tumblr.com/) [benicebefunny](http://benicebefunny.tumblr.com/), [drcoxsredwingsjersey](http://drcoxsredwingsjersey.tumblr.com/), [eliciaforever](http://eliciaforever.tumblr.com/), [mere-vanilla](http://mere-vanilla.tumblr.com/), [missbeckywrites](http://missbeckywrites.tumblr.com/), [newredshoes](http://newredshoes.dreamwidth.org/), [nightdog_barks](http://nightdog-barks.dreamwidth.org/), [shes-a-voodoo-child](http://shes-a-voodoo-child.tumblr.com/), [topaz-eyes](http://topaz-eyes.tumblr.com/) – you all knew what I needed, and I’m grateful for that.

And everyone that signal-boosted and held my hand and cheered me on and told me that it was coming along fine, even when it wasn’t: thank you for not letting me talk myself out of this. 

-

For all that the Matthias Study changed humanity, a fair amount of the world of _Scrubs_ itself stayed close to what’s presented on the show – for example, while Jordan didn’t quit the Board as she felt no pressure to be a full-time mother, Cox still became Chief of Medicine, and JD and Elliot still broke up, got back together, broke up again, and then finally managed to stay together, regardless of all the applications of the advances in reproductive technology.

The Matthias Study saw a total of twenty-seven girls and twenty-three boys. The book mentioned at the end is also called _His Motherhood_ , and the chronological series of portraits of the mothers and their children at the end needed some special formatting when it came to Cox, Jack, and Jane, with extra footnotes explaining his family’s particular situation. By the time Susan herself becomes a grandmother, approximately eight percent of all pregnancies within the United States will be carried by men, with the numbers in other countries smaller but growing.

Cox remained adamant his children receive any religious sacraments or undergo any rites until they were old enough to knowingly ask for them and understand their meaning. That, combined with his children getting most of the family history from their trips out to Pennsylvania to see their aunt without their dad along, meant Jack was never baptized. For that matter, neither was Jane – because much to Cox’s horror and eventual pride, and on the grounds that Judaism is matrilineal, Jane embraced her mother’s heritage and after years of arguing and fighting and training for the right, when she finally turned thirteen, she became a bat mitzvah.

-

Picking the music presented a particular challenge, one I left until I’d written as much of the fic as I could. I knew I wouldn’t have to secure licensing rights or argue contractual law, and I also knew I wanted to mirror the tone and usage of the show as much as possible: songs recent to and contemporary with the story as it took place in a specific place and time, somewhere in California in the very early part of the twenty-first century. Restricting myself to music that the characters might well have known and listened to themselves on their CD players and the radio meant paying more attention to nineties pop music than I ever did during that decade. 

Using that as a starting point for the music placement, arrangement, and construction meant a few songs couldn’t make the cut. As nice as it would have been to use some written after the story takes place or some more obscure artists, I didn’t think the fic would be served by anachronisms or music nobody in the fic would have heard of. I also didn’t want to get much farther afield than Great Big Sea, which gets a pass on account of Ben having traveled a great deal and college radio stations having fairly eclectic tastes to begin with. And I know I cut it close, but Jack was born on March twenty-first, 2003 – that year’s vernal equinox, you can look it up – and _The Beauty of the Rain_ came out February eighteenth that same year.

1\. _Human – The Pretenders_  
2\. _How Am I Different – Aimee Mann_  
3\. _Monsters And Angels – Voices of the Beehive_  
4\. _How Do You Tell Someone – Cowboy Mouth_  
5\. _Don’t Let It Bring You Down – Annie Lennox_  
6\. _Saviors and All – Thea Gilmore_  
7\. _Night Flight – Led Zeppelin_  
8\. _Young Americans – David Bowie_  
9\. _In Your Dreams – Sons of the Never Wrong_  
10\. _The Littlest Birds – The Be Good Tanyas_  
11\. _San Andreas Fault – Natalie Merchant_  
12\. _Bottom of the Well - James_  
13\. _My Beautiful Defense – Thea Gilmore_  
14\. _Lose This Skin – The Clash_  
15\. _Consequence Free – Great Big Sea_  
16\. _Small Bird – Sons of the Never Wrong_  
17\. _Watershed – Indigo Girls_  
18\. _Ordinary Day – Great Big Sea_  
19\. _Nite And Fog – Mercury Rev_  
20\. _The Mercy Of The Fallen – Dar Williams_  
21\. _Sweet Thing – Van Morrison_  
22\. _Cactus Tree – Joni Mitchell_  
23\. _Stolen Car – Beth Orton_  
24\. _Try – Nelly Furtado_  
25\. _Nightingale – Norah Jones_  
26\. _Find The River - REM_  
27\. _Fascist Architecture – Bruce Cockburn_  
28\. _Braided Hair – 1 Giant Leap_  
29\. _Lady Madonna – The Beatles_  
30\. _Wonder – Natalie Merchant_  
31\. _Something So Strong – Crowded House_  
32\. _Are You Out There – Dar Williams_  
33\. _The Moth – Aimee Mann_  
34\. _All The Wine – The National_  
35\. _Wrecking Force – Voxtrot_


End file.
